happened, they discovered something very interesting: the leaders
in the community spoke a different dialect, full of intellectual w ords
and Marxist rhetoric, than the people they lived among. T he process
that made them leaders had also draw n them out of the mainstream
of the community.
So the NGO w ent back, and this time they avoided the
community leaders and tried to get members of the community—
sixteen-year-old kids and the like—interested in w riting the scripts
and making the films. It w asn’t easy, but it w orked.
By the time w e visited, w hich w as a couple of years later, the
NGO simply brought in the truck and the big screen. T he people in
the community—mostly young, but not entirely—w rote, shot and
acted in the films themselves. T hey got a little technical assistance
from the urban professionals, but essentially nothing else.
T here w as a big screen in the middle of a public area w ith little
bars around. Lots and lots of people from the community w ere
there—children and old people, racially mixed. It w as in prime
television time, nine o’clock in the evening. T he people w atching
w ere obviously very much engaged in w hat w as happening.
T he dialog w as in Portuguese, so I couldn’t understand a lot of it,
but I got enough to see that they w ere dealing w ith quite serious
issues—although w ith humor and clow ns mixed in. T here w as a skit
on racism. (In theory, there isn’t supposed to be any in Brazil.)
A black person w ould go to an office and ask for a job, then a
w hite person w ould do the same, and of course they w ere treated
totally differently. Everybody in the audience w as laughing and
making comments. T here w as a segment on AIDS, and something
about the debt.
R ight after the films ended, one of the actresses—w ho w as quite
good and looked about seventeen (at most)—started w alking around
the audience w ith a microphone, interview ing people about w hat
they’d just seen. T heir comments and criticisms w ere filmed live,
eliciting more reactions.
T his is very impressive community-based media of a sort that
I’ve never seen before, accomplished in spite of the initial failure I
described. It w as in an extremely poor area. It w as an experience
I’m sure I w ould never have read about in a book.
We saw something similar in Buenos Aires. Some friends from
the university took my w ife and me to a shantytow n w here they
w ork as activists. It’s a very poor community in a very rich city;
ann
(Ann)
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