Urban Occupations: Cinema and the Struggle for the Right to Housing

Abstract

This chapter analyses the relationship between cinema and the pursuit of the right to housing in Brazil’s largest urban occupations. It works with notions of cinema that go beyond the consecrated forms, such as documentary or fiction films. It focuses on a cinema that has urgency as one of its principal characteristics and embraces the circulation of images as unedited videos, interviews, recordings of demonstrations, public lessons or even as a feature film: a set of works that are vectors of insurgencies and product of network composed by squatters and supporters organized as a war machine, in the Deleuzian sense of the term. The chapter provides an examination of daily micro-revolutions in course, its small victories and how history becomes visible in images.