Brasil de Fato film about MST cocoa premiered at a festival in Mexico and will be broadcast on TV

Brasil de Fato

The documentary film Terra Vista, produced by Brasil de Fato in partnership with the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCS), premiered on Wednesday (25) at the eighth edition of the Hispanic American Meeting of Independent Documentary Film and Video: Contra el Silencio Todas las Voces. The event runs from September 20 to 28, 2024, in different Mexican cities.

In Mexico City, the film was at Faro Cosmos and Cineteca de Las Artes on Wednesday (24), and on Thursday (26), it will be on screen at Cineteca de Las Artes in Chiapas, a state marked by the Zapatista struggle for liberation.

The Brasil de Fato film was selected as part of the Environment and Sustainable Development category, one of nine categories. See the full list of films here.

Terra Vista will be broadcast on the following public and university channels in Mexico until September 20, 2026: Canal 11, Canal 14, Canal 21, Canal 22 and TV Unam.

The Encuentro Hispanoamericano de Cine y Video Documental Independiente: Contra el Silencio Todas las Voces is an event for traveling through various realities and aesthetics of Mexico and Latin America.

The festival’s first edition was in 2000, when the only film festivals in Mexico were Guadalajara (1986) and Guanajuato (1998). In general, the situation in Latin America didn’t differ much: few events publicized and gave recognition to social documentaries.

Screenings

In addition to its premiere at the Contra el Silencio Todas las Voces Festival, Terra Vista has had other screenings, including other festivals, conferences and academic events.

In October 2023, the film was screened for the first time at the II Dilemmas of Humanity International Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, for more than 140 grassroots organizations, trade unions and political parties from 70 countries.

The documentary film was also part of the conference The Future of the Amazon: A New Era of Indigenous Activism, Post-Carbon Environmental Models, and Latin American Partnerships with China and the Global South, which happened in the same month at the University of California (UCS) in Santa Barbara, United States.

On the film festival circuit, in addition to being selected for the previously mentioned Mexican festival, Terra Vista was screened at the second edition of the Eu Mais Velha Festival in May 2024 in São José dos Campos, São Paulo state. In November this year, it will be at the 11th Velho Chico Environmental Film Festival in Penedo, Alagoas state.

The film also toured classrooms at Brazilian public universities, such as the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE, in Portuguese) and the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA, in Portuguese).

About Terra Vista

Directed by Brasil de Fato reporter Pedro Stropasolas and Noa Cykman, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the documentary film Terra Vista portrays the journey of peasants from the Landless Rural Workers’ Terra Vista Settlement in Arataca, Bahia state, to reforest an abandoned farm and, through agroecology, build an alternative to the hegemonic model of cocoa production in Brazil.

Today, 55 families are settled on 904 hectares of land, and they are all involved in cocoa and chocolate production, standing out for their clean production chain, as well as their agroforestry approach and ecological preservation. Since 2000, the community has recovered 92% of the Aliança River’s riparian forest and 80% of its springs.

The film features unpublished interviews with settlers, including some of its first members, and portrays how the agroecological transition process began and continues today. The trajectories and thoughts of community members expose a working agenda that combines social justice, food sovereignty and ecological restoration.

You can watch the Terra Vista documentary film on our YouTube channel with subtitles: go to the settings on the right side of the video frame and select your language.