The power of dreams, the strength of images
Discover the curatorial proposal of the 13th Cinema and Human Rights Showcase
What can cinema do in defense of Human Rights?
Throughout history, cinema has helped give visibility to anti-colonial struggles (for example, documenting independence movements in Africa), denounce unacceptable working conditions (in films made in partnership with the labor movement, inside and outside factories), and constitute evidence in situations of violence and abuse of power (in recordings often made clandestinely, under different dictatorships). And today? What is the role of cinema in the struggle for Human Rights? This question accompanied us in preparing the program of the Cinema and Human Rights Showcase in this 13th edition, which marks its return after a forced and far too long interruption.
From the outset, it was clear that diversity should be a priority. On the one hand, there was the need for the films to be in tune with the broad field of Human Rights. On the other, it was essential to have in the showcase films made by filmmakers who are diverse both geographically and in terms of gender.
How to do this? In July 2023, Lucas de Oliveira Mansur Saadallah, a student in the Department of Cinema and Video at Universidade Federal Fluminense, defended an undergraduate thesis entitled “Disabilities in cinema: a theoretical (and applied) study on crip theory”. Lucas studied characters with disabilities in a series of films, asking how they might be seen by spectators with disabilities.
“Thinking about the disabled spectator leads us to question, beyond consuming cinema, the whole process of making cinema. After all, who is represented?” he writes. His work supports the defense of audiovisual narratives made by representatives of marginalized social groups.
The curatorship selected films made mostly by people who maintain a direct connection with the subjects addressed, linked to activism for the right to territory, the fight against racism, the inclusion of people with disabilities, sexual and gender freedom, the affirmation of identity and ancestry, etc. Gathered around the theme “Overcoming hate, sowing horizons”, the seventeen films in the selection offer seventeen paths for thinking about the relationship between Cinema and Human Rights in today’s Brazil. They are very diverse answers – diversity is in itself an answer, as we stated from the start – but they point to a common desire to dream the future from primordial memories.
In the films gathered here, filmmakers from the five regions of Brazil place cinema – and more specifically making cinema – as a fundamental element in winning the possibility of dreaming. The works of Hanna Limulja and Davi Kopenawa on the importance of dreams for the Yanomami are, in this sense, an inspiration for the curatorship. For the Yanomami, “the dream is conceived as a form of knowledge, and the person who has an intense dream activity is considered wise,” notes Limulja in O desejo dos outros. Uma etnografia dos sonhos yanomami (2022, p. 100). One can, of course, dream of the past or the future, but while one dreams, the dream is present – as in cinema, an art of the present, which always places us before something that is happening now. And “the Yanomami dream is […] where all images meet” (Limulja, 2022, pp. 102-103). The five programs of the showcase were designed with inspiration from the Tree of Dreams, created by Omama, the demiurge of the Yanomami, so that humans could dream as soon as its flowers bloomed.
The first of them, the Opening Session, presents Nas asas da Pan Am, a feature made in 2020 by Silvio Tendler, the great honoree of this edition, defined by diplomat Arnaldo Carrilho, his friend, as “the filmmaker of the defeated, the filmmaker of interrupted dreams”. Born in 1950 in Rio de Janeiro, Tendler approached cinema through the desire to tell the story of João Cândido Felisberto (1880-1969), the “Black Admiral” who led the Revolt of the Lash, an uprising of Black sailors against the working conditions imposed by white officers. The documentary was never completed – the footage of the interview with João Cândido perished amid the repression after the 1968 coup – but Tendler did not abandon his commitment to a cinema engaged in the struggle for a fairer world. Released on the filmmaker’s 70th birthday, Nas asas da Pan Am is a biographical film, made, in his words, “with scraps of my story”.
It is also a tribute to filmmakers who preceded him in engaged cinemas across the planet: Chris Marker, Joris Ivens, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, René Vautier, Costa Gavras, Gillo Pontecorvo. The photographs taken by Tendler since he received his first Kapsa camera from his father, still a boy, attest to the power of images, raw material for memory. Professor Elianne Ivo wrote a beautiful text about Tendler and his cinema (p. 29 of this catalogue).
those we have distanced ourselves from manage to make themselves present. O que pode um corpo?, by Victor Di Marco and Márcio Picoli, proposes a different exercise in memory: did we already have memory when we were still a fetus? “If I could remember something, I would choose to have the memory of how I felt my body,” says Santa Catarina native Victor Di Marco in the film, himself a person with a disability and an activist for the rights of people with disabilities (his film was among those studied by Lucas Saadallah in his thesis). The Roots program concludes with A poeira dos pequenos segredos (2012), by Bertrand Lira, the only fiction in the set, in which a conflict-ridden relationship between a man and a woman is set in the Cariri region of Paraíba
But what happens when a dream turns into action? The joy and fear involved in the act of planting, of realizing a project and opening up to a new time is present in the films of the Seeds program. Made by Pará filmmaker Jorane Castro, Ribeirinhos do asfalto (2011) narrates the day when
Deisy, a girl from Combu island who dreams of living in Belém to continue her studies, crosses the river by canoe in search of shelter at her cousin’s house. Adão, Eva e o Fruto Proibido (2021), by R. B. Lima, also invests in a moment of change, when a trans woman begins living with her teenage son, after years in which they had no contact at all. In Nossos espíritos seguem chegando – Nhe’e Kuery Jogueru Teri (2021), by Kuaray Poty (Ariel Ortega) and Bruno Huyer, the dream of gestating a child is led by Mbya Guarani filmmaker Pará Yxapy (Patrícia Ferreira). Pregnant during the Covid-19 pandemic, she reflects on the meanings of the arrival of a new life at a time when humanity is sick. In Me farei ouvir (2022), by Bianca Novais and Flora Egécia, we observe the journey of women who have conquered spaces in Brazilian politics, in the struggle against female under-representation in spaces of power. The Seeds program closes with Escrevivência e Resistência: Maria Firmina dos Reis e Conceição Evaristo (2021), by Renato Barbieri and Juliana Borges, the 11th episode of the television series Libertárixs, dedicated to two fundamental Black women writers of Brazilian literature who are finally gaining recognition.
The Cinema and Human Rights Showcase also features two sessions for children and young people, called Fruits. To make a film, collective involvement is almost always necessary, the participation of a team that includes cast, direction, production, editing… In this sense, every film that finds its audience constitutes the realization of a dream – and opens space for sowing new dreams. Working to carry out a collective project is what drives Um filme de verão (2019), by Jô Serfaty, filmed in Rio das Pedras, in Rio’s West Zone, with four young people trying to get their biggest dreams off the ground in the hottest months of the year. Made by the children of the José Albino Pimentel Municipal School and intended for the children of the future, Tesouro quilombola (2021) is one of the fruits of the audiovisual education project developed for the literacy of students of Quilombo Guguri-Ipiranga, in Paraíba. In Mutirão, o filme (2022), by Lincoln Péricles, a child presents the collective construction of her neighborhood and, in Cósmica (2022), by Ana Bárbara Ramos, children engage in the fight against the climate crisis. The session ends with O Pato (2022), by Antonio Galdino, in which a daughter takes part in combating violence within her own home.
Text taken from the catalogue of the 13th Cinema and Human Rights Showcase
Author
LÚCIA MONTEIRO
Head of the Department of Cinema and Video at UFF, where she teaches at undergraduate and graduate levels. She also works as a critic and curator, having conceived the showcases África(s). Cinema e Revolução (Caixa Belas Artes, 2016) and África(s). Cinema e memória em construção (Caixa Cultural, 2018), among others. Her research involves non-hegemonic cinemas, screenwriting studies and aesthetic analysis. She is an advisor to the NGO Repórter Brasil, which since 2001 has worked in favor of labor rights and in the fight against slave labor.
