Film-making for social change amongst rural youth in agroecological transition in the Zona da Mata mineira, Brazil

Resumen

Even though young peasants are active in agroecological organizations and capable of producing
videos with their cell phones, they usually don’t produce films for social change. To encourage
this practice, youth organizations linked to unions of peasants in the Zona da Mata-MG
and a Ph.D. researcher specialized in ethnovideography co-organized film workshops. The
workshops had two goals: 1) to learn to film for social change and 2) to bring together young
people from the countryside. The workshops allowed us to reflect on the potential of producing
films for social change, as they revealed the realities of gender oppression and struggles of
young peasants, enabled the exchange of knowledge and problematized food production while
pointing out exits, such as Agroecology. The article concludes that there is a lot of potential in
film production by rural youth for social change particularly through a new kind of participatory
film: peasant-to-peasant through video.