Memory of black cinema in Brazil
O Cinema deTerreiro is a Digital Museum dedicated to the memory of black cinema and audiovisual in Salvador and the Recôncavo Baiano, whose thread is the ancestry, trajectory and collection of Luiz Orlando da Silva (1945-2006).
A research based on the thesis of journalist Pedro A. Caribé, defended at the University of Brasília (UNB) in 2019.
Candomblé terreiros are evoked for being a source of survival and autonomy for the African legacy in this territory. They are symbols that penetrate the narratives of Bahian and Brazilian filmography, weaving an identity recognized in the world. And also in the exchange and desecration of narratives.
Luiz “O” constitutes a generation of militants who touts such a legacy in order to expose the myth of racial democracy from the 1970s onwards. He was a self-taught person who focused on training through books, newspapers and magazines, and the innovator: films. It did this by entering public institutions in order to promote film clubs, research, films and festivals in Brazil and abroad.
Luiz lived in a period of greatest scarcity in a key dimension of black cinema: patrimonial and artistic direction. And, the solution to take a step forward in history was to use a curatorship that connected a vast filmography to territories that give new meaning to the narratives to their life aspirations.
This trajectory is reconnected here to many others that face genocide in complex processes that deracialize, divide, erase, expropriate and folklorize what comes from Africa. Authors are reconnected in actors, directors, screenwriters, editors, cameramen, musicians… And that find in the Museum a space of preservation, promotion and diffusion in multiple languages and four dynamic galleries due to the panorama of transformations.
