UMA OUTRA HISTORIA – Four Films on Labor Rights for Women in Brazil

Programme

• Creche-Lar (Maria Luiza d'Aboim, BR 1978, 8')

  During the 1970s, filmmaker Maria Luiza d’Aboim was part of the Center for Brazilian Women (CMB), a feminist organization that provided a forum for thinking through the place of women in society. The lack of creches and the urgent need for public infrastructure designed to support mothers with childcare were recurring discussion points at the center. D’Aboim’s first film, Creche-Lar (Home-Daycare), documents the search for practical solutions as implemented by an experimental community daycare project in Vila Kennedy, Rio de Janeiro, which employed mothers from the local community.

• Mulheres: uma outra história (Eunice Gutman, BR 1988, 35’)

  Mulheres: uma outra história focuses on various aspects of women’s participation in the Brazilian political scene, featuring interviews with women in the Constituent Assembly and leaders of the rising women’s rights movement. Suffragist Carmen Portilho appears in the film to remind viewers about the long history of struggle for women to earn the right to vote in the country.

• Mulheres da Boca (Inês Castilho en Cida Aidar, BR 1982, 22’)

  Filmmakers Cida Aidar and Inês Castilho met as part of the feminist collective that edited the newspaper Nós Mulheres between 1976 and 1979. Filmed in 1981 in the Boca do Lixo region of São Paulo, infamous for its porn cinemas and brothels, Mulheres da Boca reveals the lives of sex workers on their own terms, as they are captured between seduction, play, and violence, against the backdrop of the corruption and abuse exercised by those who ran the Boca de Lixo.

• Sulanca (Katia Mesel, BR 1986, 14’)

  The Feira da Sulanca still exists as a famous market that sells and exports items for the national clothing industry in Pernambuco, Northeastern Brazil. While these markets were once an unfriendly place for women struggling to make a living, Katia Mesel’s Sulanca documents the economic revolution of the women of Santa Cruz do Capibaribe: sewers who, through collaboration and willpower, managed to make lives for themselves and change the socioeconomic panorama of Brazil’s most neglected region.