Filús Quilombo Documentary: Social Mobilization and Participatory Creation through Film is a micro-project undertaken by Pamela Block and Ateliê Ambrosina as part of the “Mobilizing disability survival skills for the urgencies of the Anthropocene” (MDSSA) Project funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant (PI, Arseli Dokumaci).
The goal of this research-creation project is to support people with Albinism and other disability experiences from Quilombo Filús in Alagoas, Brazil to share stories about their lives by making a documentary film. This project grows out of the Disability Portraits Project (retratosdeficias.com) in which co-creative duos fashioned images or podcasts to provide portraits of the disability experience in Brazil during this precarious time of the pandemic and the Bolsonaro government .The proposed project would allow a larger number of individuals to engage in the co-creation of a documentary film project with the technical assistance of experts from the feminist art collective Ateliê Ambrosina and ethnographic documentation by anthropologist Pamela Block and her students in Brazil and at Western University. All participants from Filús will be paid for their time and participate in decision-making at all phases of the project. Our objectives of include HQP training in participatory ethnographic research, creation of a feature length documentary for circulation in Brazil, Canada, and internationally to seek additional funding from sources such as SSHRC and the Brazil Canada fund. We will be training students from Canada and Brazil and secondary and aspiring post-secondary school students in Filús about our knowledge mobilization and research-creation processes.