🗓 Tuesday 1 December | Doors 18:30 | Screening 19:00
📍 The Cinema Museum, 2 Dugard Way, London SE11 4TH
⏱ Running time: approx. 85 min, plus discussion | All ages | English subtitles
Minas Gerais, literally “General Mines”, has been mined for more than three centuries. First it was gold for the Portuguese crown, and historians argue much of that gold ended up in London. Today it is iron ore for global markets. The wealth leaves. The waste stays.
In November 2015, the Fundão tailings dam in Mariana, owned by Samarco, a joint venture of Vale and BHP, collapsed. It killed 19 people and buried villages under toxic sludge that ran the entire length of the Doce River to the sea. Just over three years later, in January 2019, a Vale dam in Brumadinho gave way, killing 272 people. Affected communities refuse to call these accidents. To them, they are crimes: the foreseeable cost of putting profit before people.
The trail leads back to London. In November 2025, the High Court here found BHP liable for the Mariana collapse, after hundreds of thousands of Brazilians brought their fight to the company’s doorstep. A decade on, they are still waiting for justice.
Tonight’s films don’t come from the boardrooms. They come from the communities living downstream: people whose rivers, springs and homes were taken, and who refuse to be silenced or disappear.
Jangada Água Viva
Dir. Maíra do Nascimento & Carolina de Moura | Brazil | 2025 | Documentary | 15 min
How much is a body of water worth? In Brumadinho, the springs that have sustained the Jangada community for generations are threatened by the reopening of a mine. This comes six years after the Vale dam crime murdered 272 people. Residents call for unity in defence of their water.
Quanto VALE 1 Década? (What Is a Decade Worth?)
Dir. Clementino Junior | Brazil | 2025 | Documentary | 23 min
Ten years after the Fundão dam collapse in Mariana, the director returns to four people affected by the disaster. He first interviewed them in 2018. Together they reflect on lives interrupted by a river of mining waste.
Feridas na Terra (Wounds in the Land)
Dir. Helena Duarte | Brazil | 2025 | Documentary | 46 min
On the Serra do Curral in Belo Horizonte, the Taquaril community and Kilombo Manzo resist illegal mining. The film follows their memories, public hearings and strategies to defend the land they have lived on for generations.
