Reel Brazil #1: A Brazilian on Tontine Street

Reel Brazil, creatively directed by Nina Shen, and co-curated by Nina Shen & Solange Farkas features historic and contemporary works of video art, experimental cinema, and digital commissions that interrogate systems of control, elevate outsider voices, and reimagine art as a tool of social and political transformation. It draws cultural parallels between Brazil’s post-dictatorship era and the UK’s Thatcher years, exemplified by the UK’s National Disability Movement – the festival explores a lineage of creative resistance, enabled by new technologies.
Season 1 – A Brazilian on Tontine Street highlights a selection of experimental video art from Associação Cultural Videobrasil’s Historical Archive (between 1978-1990), featuring Brazilian artists such Sandra Kogut, Vincent Carelli, Rafael França (RIP), Eder Santos, Lenora de Barros and Walter Silveira.

Sandra Kogut: What Do You Think People Think Brazil Is? | 1990 | Brazil | 5min 30sec

is a fast-paced, playful collage of bold text, vibrant imagery, and candid street interviews with Brazilians and foreign tourists. This sharp and satirical short explores how Brazil is seen—both by locals and tourists —through a mix of clichés: the carnival, football, corruption, sex, and bananas. Eye-catching and thought-provoking, it questions how media stereotypes shape national identity.

Vincent Carelli: O Espírito da TV | 1990 | Brazil | 18min

This powerful short documentary, created through the Vídeo nas Aldeias project, captures the emotional and powerful reactions of the Waiãpi people in Brazil as they watch themselves – and other Indigenous groups like the Gavião, Nhambiquara, Krahô, Guarani, and Kaiapó – on a television screen for the first time.

The experience is both fascinating and unsettling for the community. Seeing their own image and shared cultural threads with other tribes, and their anxieties with the presence of outside oppressors like the white settlers and gold miners. The video provokes deep self-reflections on their cultural identity, but at the same time becomes a powerful tool, not just for preservation of their cultures, but as defiant resistance to the outside world – by disseminating their own image and voices through the medium of the TV.

Rafael França: Reencontro | 1984 | Brazil | 7 min

Reencontro is the first part of a video art trilogy by França where he experimented with fictional narratives using the moving image to explore the psychological conditions characterised by the postmodern & post-dictatorship period.

It follows a man who confronts his past and his own existence and mortality. There’s no clear storyline or dialogue – instead, the video uses a fragmented style to explore complex emotions of alienation, trauma, unspeakable loneliness and despair.

Lenora de Barros, Walter Silveira: Homenagen a George Segal | 1985 | Brazil | 3min 32 sec

Translated as a Tribute to George Segal – it is a video performance by De Barros, created in collaboration with Walter Silveira. Initially created as a photo-performance in 1975, the work was inspired by the lonely and pathetic figures created by the American Sculptor (Segal), emblematic of the American hyper-consumerist pop cultures that De Barros gently critiques and satirises.

Facing the camera, De Barros brushes her teeth vigorously to the sound of The Beatles’ “She Love You”, until the foaming of the toothpaste completely covers her face and head.

Eder Santos, Uakti | 1978 | Brazil | 6min 32 sec

Is a hypnotic short video that blends music, movement, and surreal imagery – deconstructing Ravel’s Bolero and reimagined through the sounds of Uakti – an experimental Brazilian band (1978–2015, Marco Antônio Guimarães, Artur Andrés Ribeiro, Paulo Sérgio Santos and Décio Ramos) known for their handmade instruments crafted from pipes, aqualungs and even gourds. Set against dreamy visuals of dancers, fish, and flowers, Uakti transforms a French orchestral classic into something folksy and full of Brazilian rhythm.

Reel Brazil features historic and contemporary works of video art, experimental cinema, and digital commissions that interrogate systems of control, elevate outsider voices, and reimagine art as a tool of social and political transformation. It draws cultural parallels between Brazil’s post-dictatorship era and the UK’s Thatcher years, exemplified by the UK’s National Disability Movement – the festival explores a lineage of creative resistance, enabled by new technologies.

Brazil has long stood at the crossroads of authoritarianism and democracy, a nation marked by deep post-colonial struggles, social inequality, and vibrant cultural resistance. Emerging in the wake of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985), a generation of artists and filmmakers embraced accessible video technologies to document authentic Brazilian realities, challenge mainstream propaganda, and give voice to the marginalized. This body of work forms the powerful core of Reel Brazil, connecting past creative mutinies to urgent contemporary struggles.

Creatively directed and co-curated by Nina Shen and presented by CT20 in Folkestone, a coastal town at the intersection of art-led regeneration and class conflict, Reel Brazil also confronts the tensions of gentrification, cultural erasure, and experiences of displacement for local residents. It reclaims space for radical creativity through the power of storytelling.

Above video stills: Courtesy of Videobrasil Archive