Dr Telma Hoyler
Funding period: 15 April 2024 – 31 August 2025
Type of funding:
Other Grants
DOI: https://doi.org/10.69752/8V6G-6308
Award Number: USF-KMA-240304
This grant was awarded as a follow-up to Political representation in the city.
Democracy on the ground is a project to create a short ethnographic documentary film about how people living in the city’s peripheries engage with democracy and elections in São Paulo, Brazil (municipal elections in Brazil will occur in November 2024).
Throughout the film, a team composed of Dr Hoyler and Ricardo Moura will follow the electoral campaign of Geraldo, a left-wing candidate for São Paulo’s City Council. For several years, Geraldo has worked as a political broker—mobilising support for senior politicians—but now wants to make a move to be elected himself. The film will explore how the broker/now candidate mobilises his relational network and expands it within the city, aiming to win the election. While doing so, he builds his own political space.
The proposal is based on the point of view of marginalised communities. Not through or without them. It is an ethnographic film because its point of gravity comes from what people we learn with experience as important to them in a dialectical relationship. Sites for shooting are mainly in the peripheries of the city of São Paulo, where brokerage structures help bridge the State to people and deliver public policies. A documentary is an exciting medium to bring up such discussions. If, for example, the camera is employed as an analytical tool, making certain subjects and objects opaque or inaccessible while highlighting others, we are driven to question how knowledge is produced and faced with the power of seeing and unseeing.
In a world where democratic disenchantment is increasing, Democracy on the ground will communicate the value of democracy as a place where encounters and conflicts can happen while respecting differences.