Perspectives on Contemporary Brazil

Screening and Discussion with Researcher and Filmmaker Patrícia Ramiro on the Ethnographic Documentary “From serfs to free peasants, from the factory to the assentamento.”

The Maison Suger is pleased to welcome Brazilian sociologist Patrícia Ramiro for an evening dedicated to the transformations of rural life in Northeastern Brazil. The event will feature a screening of the ethnographic documentary De cativo a liberto: da usina ao assentamento (2024), co-directed by Patrícia Ramiro and Ronaldo Alves.

The film is the culmination of more than five years of research conducted within the research group Identity and Memory of Rural and Urban Working Classes at the Federal University of Paraíba. Drawing on the testimonies of former workers from a sugar mill in the Brejo region of Paraíba, the documentary traces the profound social transformations that followed the bankruptcy of the Santa Maria sugar mill in 1992 and the subsequent expropriation of its lands beginning in 1997. Once agricultural laborers living under a highly hierarchical social order, these men and women became beneficiaries of agrarian reform and owners of their own land. The film explores themes of dependency, social mobility, memory, and freedom. It shows how the transition from the “time of the sugar mill” to the “time of the settlement” reshaped relationships to work, territory, family life, and the future. Combining archival materials, photographs, historical documents, and life histories collected through fieldwork, the documentary also offers an original reflection on the ongoing transformations of rural Brazil.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmaker on the challenges of agrarian reform, social science research methods, and the use of documentary filmmaking as a tool for both investigation and the dissemination of scholarly knowledge.