Reel Brazil #3: CRIPS FIGHT FOR RIGHTS & CIVIL RESISTANCE FROM BRAZIL

Season 3 explores the shared heritage of fighting against injustice, resistance & subversion of established orders by ordinary people from Brazil and the UK, drawing cultural parallels between Brazil’s post-dictatorship era and the UK’s Thatcher years.

Amongst a unique selection of radical moving image works on UK’s disability rights and Brazil’s civil resistance, we highlight a collection of new moving image works on the deceased artist/rights-activist, Keith Armstrong, telling the stories of his life-long fight to remove barriers.

The deceased Disabled Artist/Activist Keith Armstrong left an unique visual record of the Disability Rights Movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s through his photography, and these became the centre of a major landmark exhibition: CRIP ARTE SPAZIO: THE DAM IN VENICE in 2024. As the exhibition draws to a close in early January 2025, director David Hevey (also a disability rights activist, photographer, and a reporter at the BBC who covered these demonstrations) presents the individual images and recalls the stories of the protests and protestors behind them.

The deceased Disabled Artist/Activist Keith Armstrong was a lifelong socialist and activist committed to fighting for social injustices. Access to transport for disabled people formed the core of his activism, and he played a key role in the Disability Rights Movement & Disability Arts Movement, helping disabled people achieve civil rights. NDMAC director David Hevey takes us through his personal archive and legacy, telling the stories of his fight to remove barriers.

Filmed at night and under low light, the video follows groups of young people from the outskirts of São Paulo who travel huge distances and cross numerous barriers to get into a rave party without buying a ticket. During their expedition, they face mud, streams, dogs, even shooting from the guards. Their relentless efforts were repeatedly thwarted by the growing army of security guards, who both frustrate and admire these rebellious youths.

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED began in 2002 as an anti-TV programme, whose aim is to intervene in television media using artistic content and journalistic images.

In 2003, ARNSTV participated in several urban intervention and media projects, working in partnership with groups and institutions such as Mídia Tática Brasil, CMI (Independent Media Centre) and SESC (Anti-Spectacle Territory). The São José de Rio Preto International Theatre Festival in July 2003 was the starting point for the development of a partnership with Cia. Cachorra in the LIBERTE-SE project, which combines urban intervention, theatre, video and music. Following this presentation, the group was invited to represent Brazil at the Mercosul International Theatre Festival in Córdoba, Argentina.

Directed by David Hevey, the landmark 1990s BBC documentary film which plays with the notions of victim/empowerment through a hybrid of performance, chant and verite documentary to create this landmark film which portrayed the crip with power, built an argument towards UK civil rights and changed the way we see the crips. Although experimental film making, Freak Out reached nearly 750,000 audiences on its first television broadcast. The film went onto lead seasons at the British Film Institute and was widely distributed by the British Council to international audiences.

In order to have their welfare needs met by the state, a disabled person needs to try to translate the intensely personal issues of the body into the dehumanised, baroque language of bureaucracy, and must forcefully go along with all its processes. Wallwork’s Merg reflects that disorientating experience.

The documentary short tells the stories of three blind sisters who sing in exchange for charity in Campina Grande, Paraíba, Brazil. With candour and humour, it’s a warm portrait of their commitment to survival – they have nothing left but courage and resilience.

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.