🎬 Brazil Unfiltered: Mãos à Terra (2025) + special event in collaboration with Cityplot

Brazil Unfiltered comes back from 1 to 31 October with a special curation of documentary films to contextualise the presidential elections taking place in Brazil this month. Centred around territorial struggles and the frontlines of resistance, the programme starts with a masterpiece from the late Eduardo Coutinho, followed by a bonus screening, a sequence of 3 films set in the Amazon, and a closure event + screening about climate resilience and ecological farming.

MÃOS À TERRA 
Sérgio Guidoux | 2025 | Brazil | 80’ | EN subtitles

In the extreme south of Brazil, over more than four decades farming families, urban environmentalists and progressive clergy join together to imagine and build an alternative to the problematic conventional agricultural model.

Mãos à Terra was produced over six years (2018-2024), portraying environmental activism in Brazil through the lens of the FAE, the largest ecological farming fair in Latin America, held since 1989 in Porto Alegre. Combining interviews with market-goers, agronomists, peasant farmers, environmentalists, and representatives of the MST (Landless Workers' Movement), the film contrasts these farmers' sustainable practices with the monoculture model promoted by the 1960s “Green Revolution”, backed by the military dictatorship, which caused rural exodus and land concentration in Rio Grande do Sul. Drawing on extensive archival research, VHS tapes, photographs, and news reports, along with footage shot across various towns in the state, the film also revives the words of environmentalist José Lutzenberger, drawing a parallel between past human choices and today's climate crises.

Alongside the film screening, we will also have a very special event in collaboration with Cityplot, a collective promoting urban farming and permaculture in Amsterdam. Details to be shared on Cavia's website soon. :-)