🗓 Saturday 5 December | Doors 5.30pm | Screening 6pm
📍 144 Cambridge Heath Rd, Bethnal Green, London E1 5QJ
⏱ Running time: approx. 60 min | 14+ | All films w/ English subtitles
Brazil’s military dictatorship ruled from the 1964 coup until 1985. It tortured, killed and disappeared those who stood in its way, from student activists and trade unionists to the Indigenous peoples who resisted its push to “develop” their lands.
No one was ever held to account. The 1979 Amnesty Law, passed by the regime itself, protected the torturers along with their victims. Many institutions forged under the dictatorship remained untouched. Many of those involved in state torture remain unaccountable.
The dictatorship ended, but its machinery didn’t. Police structures forged under dictatorship still operate by the same logic, with the military police frequently patrolling the favelas and peripheries. Today Brazilian police kill thousands of people every year, most of them young and Black. In October 2025, a single police operation on Rio’s Alemão and Penha favelas became the deadliest in the country’s history.
These four films trace that line, from the survivors of the 1960s to the children of Rio writing to the Supreme Court to ask the police to stop killing them. And they celebrate what has always resisted: the music, art and collective life of the periphery, which refuses to be silenced.
Escudo (Shield)
Dir. Andrey Haag & Cauê Santiago | Brazil | 2025 | Documentary | 8 min
What did the end of the dictatorship really change? The Baixada Santista has lived through the killing of funk MCs and Operation Shield, which the film calls the state’s second-deadliest police massacre after Carandiru. Both tell a story of state violence that never stopped.
Cartas pela Paz (Letters for Peace)
Dir. Mariana Reade, Patrick Zeiger & Thays Acaiabe | Brazil | 2025 | Documentary | 26 min
“Stop killing us,” writes 14-year-old Luiz Fernando to Brazil’s Supreme Court. Five children from Rio’s favelas demand something no child should have to ask for: the right to play and go to school without being shot at.
60 Anos Depois (60 Years Later)
Dir. Flávio Ferreira | Brazil | 2025 | Documentary | 20 min
Sixty years after the 1964 coup, survivors in Mato Grosso speak about the torture and persecution they lived through, and the scars the country has never properly faced.
Histórias Periféricas (Peripheral Stories)
Dir. Luan Allen | Brazil | 2026 | Music video | 4 min
Made independently in a Sergipe neighbourhood, with artists, residents and collectives. The periphery doesn’t wait to be represented. It tells its own story.
Stay after this programme for our closing screening and Q&A/Discussion. same place, starting 7.30pm.
