A common audience reaction to watching More Earth Will Feel is to ask the question “What can we do?” The directors of More Earth Will Fall are motivated by a strong desire to affect change.  The film is the centre piece of a wider project using film and storytelling to provide a platform for authentic favela voices in the wider world at a critical time for Brazil and its more neglected communities.

Screenings

In 2018, we carried out a series of screenings of More Earth Will Fall documentary in partnership with local community activists and academics. This was accompanied by panel discussions with opinion makers and policy makers in dialogue with grassroots community leaders and favela residents, as well as the filmmakers themselves. This screening tour consisted on 23 screenings over a month-long period. Many new partnerships were created, and since then the film continues to be shown in Brazil.

The idea is for the film to be used to so that communities can engage with the mainstream about the development of their cities and the poverty and violence they experience on a daily basis, creating empathy and understanding as the pre-requisite for meaningful changes in both micro and macro policy.

Filmmaking

More Earth Will Fall provides a platform for one family’s story that reflects wider, global social concerns. Our method of community-led filmmaking will be taken a step further, whereby we bring our experience of making this film and a broader knowledge of filmmaking and participatory production methods as facilitators in enabling often-marginalised communities to tell their stories. Alongside the screenings, we ran a 2-week long filmmaking workshop in partnership with Cursinho Popular Martin Luther King, a grassroots activist organisation who run Saturday classes for teenagers in Ferraz de Vasconcelos to help in their preparation for the university exam. The More Earth Will Fall directors, Lee McKarkiel and Sam Liebmann, ran a two-week course with the students to create a film about an issue relevant to and chosen by them, to be used as part of their social change campaign.

We were fortunate to spend more than a year of our lives since 2009 with Rosangela, Vito, Rayane and Italo, and many others from Rocinha. We witnessed their struggle and inspirational strength through adversity. It is a world often shown in a sensational way by the mainstream media. We want to raise awareness of the many colours of this unseen world, to encourage conversation between a cross-section of people in an often-divided society and to amplify the voices of those that must be heard.

Get involved

Inherent to favela communities is the capacity for self-organisation. We believe the power of a project like this lies in its ability to bring communities together at a grass roots level. Therefore, rather than seeking state or global NGO funding, we want to connect autonomous communities internationally.

If you’re part of a community that shares the concerns of those we’re working with and want to host a screening or event, please get in touch. You can read more about other filmmaking projects we are working on from Rocinha at our BRUK Docs site.