The VII International Meeting “Cinema and Other Arts” was hosted by University Beira Interior from February 22 to 24. On a panel on Cinema, Resistance and Power, Ana Sofia Pereira and Vanessa Ribeiro-Rodrigues, researchers from the FEMglocal – Glocal Feminist Movements: Interactions and Contradictions project (financed by the Foundation for Science and Technology, FCT, through national funds - PTDC/COM-CSS/4049/2021) presented two papers on how cinema can be used in favor of activism and visibility.
Ana Sofia Pereira (FEMglocal’s Post-Doc Fellow) presented a collaborative paper with fellow FEMglocal’s researchers Camila Lamartine, Carla Cerqueira (PI) and Célia Taborda (Co-PI) titled “Feminismos e grande ecrã: interações entre cinema, conhecimento científico e a (re)construção da memória feminina” [Feminisms and the big screen: interactions between cinema, scientific knowledge and the (re)construction of a feminist memory]. The presentation emphasized and discussed the ways in which cinema, particularly documentary, can be used for scientific dissemination and activism, while also making complex concepts accessible to wider audiences and giving visibility to underrepresented groups of people and parts of History.
Meanwhile, Vanessa Ribeiro-Rodrigues focused on the content analysis of the voiceover from Petra Costa’s “Democracia em Viagem” in her paper titled “Documentário social e (contra) cinema. O ponto de vista como discurso ativista em “Democracia em Vertigem”” [Social documentary and (counter) cinema. The point of view as an activist discourse in “Democracia em Vertigo”]. Her presentation examined the film’s voiceover and interviews with the director to better understand it as a social documentary and counter-narrative of activist resistance in support of democracy. Both papers were the result of FEMglocal’s research and made for a fascinating panel.