Esther Hamburger: Doing Research on Favela situation films and the production of audiovisual archives in Brazil.

Since the early 2000s, a boom in favela situation films has provoked political and aesthetic debates about who speaks about whom, and HOW. Some of these films show previously undocumented images and memories from people who live in favelas, extremely poor places where there are few archives. My research untangles these debates and the ways in which films take part in the construction of public memories. Brazilian society has begun to include large segments of the population that had been excluded for centuries, and this debate has stimulated young people who were the first in their families to reach college education to now become filmmakers. Tuned up to the world, for the first time favelas and peripheric neighborhoods are being filmed by people from these areas. On the other hand, outsiders and foreigners can also contribute with works that are able to stimulate our imagination to move beyond conventional ways of seeing things.

Esther Império Hamburger is a Professor in the School of Arts and Communications at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where she runs the Laboratory of Audiovisual Investigation and Critique, and has served as the Chair of the Department of Film, Radio and Television. She spent fall 2019 as a Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Esther has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Her book O Brasil Antenado, a sociedade da novela (Tuned Brazil: the telenovela society) was nominated for the Jabuti National Book Prize, Câmara Brasileira do Livro.