Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, Fala da Terra, BR, 2022, 20′

For this film, Wagner and de Burca collaborated with Coletivo Banzeiros, a theater group composed of members of the ‘Movement of Landless Rural Workers’ (MST, in Portuguese) who live and work in the rural and urban areas of Marabá and Parauapebas, in the southeastern region of Pará. The theater group presents a form of activist theater which is performed by members of the movement as a tool for education on their right to the land and to their culture both in the field and backstage. The theater group draws its greatest inspiration from their immediate surroundings, where the enemies of the rural workers take the form of the governor, hired assassins, the airplane, and the statue in the department store. In this allegory of social types, the current Brazilian political situation is brought into sharp focus, as if we could see it all there, on stage.

Berenice Mendes and Lu Rufalco, Classe Roceira, BR, 1985, 29′ 

Berenice Mendes and Lu Rufalco began a unique body of political film work in the 1970s, during the military dictatorship in Brazil. In Classe Roceira, Mendes and Rufalco follow the MST in their struggle to preserve nature and their land in Paraná. Similar to Fala da Terra, the protest songs sung take center stage, as well as the camps set up to protect the land. Nearly forty years before Fala da Terra, the struggle seems unchanged.