Macoll speaker and Brazilian Cinema symposium 6-7 May 2027

Counter-Choral Cinemas: Brazilian Film Since 2013

Counter-Choral Cinemas, is a two-day symposium bringing together scholars, filmmakers and students to examine the transformations of Brazilian cinema in decade since the urban protests that took place throughout the country in June  2013 – known as the jornadas de junho. 

The protests that took place across Brazil in June 2013 have been construed as a historical and cultural rupture in the country’s recent history. What began as a series of manifestações in São Paulo against an increase in public transport fares quickly developed into a broader mobilisation around a variety of political and social issues. These protests also opened up a space that the far right was swift to appropriate and redirect towards its own ideological ends. The years that followed witnessed the consolidation of an increasingly authoritarian political agenda and profound crises in Brazil’s democratic order and social pact, leading to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, the imprisonment of former President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva and the election of Jair Bolsonaro. 

These events, emerging decades after the country’s military dictatorship and the democratic reorganisation of the 1988 Constitution, precipitated the rise of a culture of intolerance and, in Flora Süssekind’s terms, a ‘chorus’ of antagonistic political forces. Under Bolsonaro, in particular, the assault on the cultural sphere — levelled through attacks on so-called ‘cultural Marxism’, the defunding of cultural institutions and the delegitimisation of artistic production — had profound consequences for the conditions under which Brazilian cinema could be produced and circulated. Yet, as Süssekind argues, the chorus of reactionary and repressive forces was met by a proliferation of counter-choruses: diverse forms of political dissent and cultural production that not only foregrounded their own marginalised or repressed histories on the screen but also sought to open up new spaces and possibilities for cinematic practice. 

This symposium seeks to map and interrogate these counter-choral cinemas: that is, the ways in which Brazilian cinema has articulated and responded to these threats posed to democracy, while simultaneously generating alternative modes of representation and production. We ask: what has the post-2013 period made possible for Brazilian cinema in aesthetic, political and institutional terms? How have Brazilian filmmakers developed new cinematic languages in response to a period marked by political rupture, social inequality and institutional precarity? What new kinds of cinema have emerged — peripheral, environmental, Indigenous, Black, queer, documentary, speculative or otherwise — that seek to foreground realities historically marginalised by dominant, existing representational regimes? 

We are equally interested in the changing geographies and infrastructures of contemporary Brazilian film. What new exhibition spaces, festivals, collectives and community filmmaking practices have emerged or developed during these years? How has Brazilian cinema moved beyond the traditional metropolitan centres of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and what new regional, Indigenous, Black and peripheral cinemas have become visible as a consequence? Finally, amid the notable recent success of Brazilian cinema on the global stage, how have these films circulated through international festivals and global circuits of recognition, and what is at stake when locally situated experiences of political and social upheaval acquire international visibility?

Rather than approaching Brazilian cinema post-2013 primarily as a cinema of crisis, this symposium asks what forms of aesthetic and political resistance, innovation and transformation have emerged from that crisis, and what these counter-choral cinemas signify for contemporary Brazil. 

Confirmed Speakers

Macoll Speaker 

Prof Lúcia Nagib, Keynote (Reading)

Dr Mariana Cunha (Westminster)

Prof Tiago de Luca (Warwick)

Prof Stephanie Dennison (Leeds)

Prof Gustavo Furtado (Duke)

Dr Rodrigo Lopes de Barros (Balearic Islands)

Dr Javier Pérez-Osorio (Edinburgh)

Dr Jamille Pinheiro (SAS, London)

Karim Aïnouz (filmmaker)

Alberto Álvares (filmmaker)

Olinda Tupinambá (filmmaker)

Takumã Kuikuro (filmmaker)