Brushing History Against the Grain: Youth, Cinema and Memory in Brazil

In Brazil, there is a growing body of films produced by young filmmakers particularly from historically criminalized and marginalized groups who are on the front lines of intersecting oppressions (unemployment, juvenicide, racism, LGBTQIA+ phobia, the dissonance between promised lives and possible lives). Both in the discursive representations within their films and in their production and distribution practices, these filmmakers create unique perspectives at the intersection of youth, identity, memory, culture, and politics.

This paper explores how this segment of contemporary Brazilian cinema challenges social structures shaped by colonial legacies on one hand, while on the other, it highlights material, symbolic, historical, and political aspects that intersect the lives of certain youth segments, that is, their social production.

An example is the film Raízes (2020, dir. Simone Nascimento and Well Amorim), the first feature-length film by the Maloka Filmes collective, composed of young filmmakers from peripheral neighborhoods in the southern region of São Paulo. Raízes follows the journey of Kelton, a young man who seeks to trace his family tree. Along the way, he encounters the erasure of Afro-descendant identities and the historical whitening of Brazilian society, exposing the marks of the colonial past in the present. Independently produced, the film has won awards at several film festivals and has been shown in cinemas, on television and community screenings.

The aesthetic approach of Raízes builds original interpretations of concepts such as space-time and memory, while also questioning the erasure of identities. These social elements are not merely external sociological references; they are internalized in the film’s structure, shaping its very artistic construction. Absence (the erasure of identity) is a constitutive structure in the film, transforming it into an aesthetic element. This is the source of its expressive and political power as it challenges Brazil’s historical memory and calls for action.