Castelo de Areia

There wasn’t actually a research. Representatives of the Santos Borrower’s Association asked me to make a “social” type of video, as we used to say back then. The idea was to rally the residents of a housing project at the BNH (National Housing Bank) against the calamitous situation in the construction of their houses, while also working as an audiovisual document for denouncement and to present for a future hearing with the department responsible for the works at Caixa Econômica Federal to be held in Santos and Brasília. I coordinated a non-governmental environmental organization from the Baixada Santista area and used the video to denounce and rally the population in defense of the environment and quality of life. In order to make this video, the residents promoted local activities such as an ice cream festival, where we showed preliminary images that worked to pep up the community’s mobilization.

The video works I made at the time were mostly aimed at the socio-environmental activism. Later, I focused my amateur experience, like a hobby, in home videos, seeking my own style and language in relation to accounts of life stories. I had an interesting experience in 1992, in New York, during UN’s prep meeting for the Eco-92, in Rio de Janeiro, when I filmed the UN Brazilian Mission, where the Minister of the Environment of the time, the famous environmentalist José Lutzemberg, denounced irregularities in IBAMA ( the Brazilian Environmental Protection  Agency), which led to dismissals and big changes in this are during the Collor administration, months prior to the impeachment. A quick editing of this meeting was used as a resource in a political sciences class at PUC-SP then. Another significant experience in a partnership was producing the film Aukê, a myth of the Krahô tribe, made with Carlos Leite and shown in film societies in Berlin and other German cities in the late 1980s.

I’d like to point out the use of image and free speech by grassroots leaderships and social movements through video as an instrument of mobilization and transformation, but also of educommunication, since videos and photos—as well as the creative process itself—was shared, working to rally, inform, form leaderships, and better prepare communities in their struggle for a higher quality of life for everyone. 

Nilo Diniz​​ in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (November 2016)