Corpos em Resistência: perspectivas feministas e decoloniais sobre os contra-arquivos do cinema entre o Brasil e o Canadá (1965–1990)

This two-day study event brings together researchers and audiovisual professionals from Canada and Brazil to examine feminist and decolonial approaches to cinematic counter-archives. Bringing together perspectives from film studies, archival studies, curatorial practices, audiovisual preservation, and digital dissemination, the event explores how feminist and marginalized audiovisual histories can be preserved, documented, circulated, and made visible.

The program focuses in particular on the relationships between archives, bodies, memory, heritage, and power. It considers how archival practices can challenge institutional forms of selection and recognition, while also examining alternative forms of preservation, restitution, circulation, and curatorial intervention. Through presentations, discussions, and film screenings, the study days seek to foster a bilateral Canada–Brazil research network around critical and feminist approaches to audiovisual archives and counter-archives.

We will close the first day of study, October 14, with a special screening at Cinéma Public starting at 5:30 PM.

SCHEDULE

9:45 a.m. — Coffee
10:00 a.m. — Opening Remarks
Building a Canada–Brazil Bilateral Network for Feminist and Critical Approaches to Film Archives
Prof. Alanna Thain, English Department, McGill University
Julia Minne, Postdoctoral Researcher, McGill University
The opening remarks will introduce the two-day program and present the objectives of the Bodies in Resistance project, with particular attention to the development of a Canada–Brazil research network focused on feminist, decolonial, and critical approaches to film archives and counter-archives.
11:00 a.m. — Keynote Lecture
Mapping, Research, Digitization, and Dissemination of Films Made During the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (1964–1985)
Prof. Patricia Machado, Department of Communication, PUC-Rio
Contra-Arquivo de Mulheres maps, preserves, and disseminates short films made by women in Brazil during the military dictatorship (1964–1985). The mapping has identified more than 400 films and their archival locations, showing the 1970s as a turning point marked by the emergence of more than 100 women directors. Drawing on the concept of the “biography of images,” this research reconstructs the production, circulation, and archival survival of each film, tracing the processes through which these works were marginalized or erased from film historiography. Deteriorating prints are currently being digitized and restored, while an open-access platform brings these films and their histories back into public circulation.
Moderator: Julia Minne
12:30–2:00 p.m. — Lunch Break
2:00–3:00 p.m. — Session I Bodies, Materiality, and the Politics of Archival Recognition
Moderator: Pr Nicholas Andueza, Communications, PUC-Rio
Archiving Contamination: Bodies, Moving Images, and Material Memory in Silvia Noronha’s Work
Cecily Raynor, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, McGill University
This presentation examines Brazilian artist Silvia Noronha’s installations and video documentation as complementary approaches to archiving extractive violence. Focusing on Shifting Geologies alongside filmed testimony from Bento Rodrigues, I explore how contaminated soils, industrial fragments, and moving images register the enduring relationships between bodies and damaged landscapes. Noronha’s speculative geological objects imagine the material afterlives of extraction, while her audiovisual research preserves situated voices and experiences. Bringing these practices into dialogue with feminist approaches to embodiment and care, I ask how contamination becomes both a bodily burden and a material archive. What forms of memory and responsibility emerge when environmental violence persists within the matter of everyday life?
Archival Recognition as a Tactic in Brazilian Screendance: Faz Que Vai (Set to Go, 2015) by Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca
Prof. Alanna Thain, English Department, McGill University
This presentation discusses the 2015 screendance video Faz Que Vai (Set to Go, 2015), one of the earliest works of screendance by artistic collaborators Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca. This work explores bodies moving at the edges of sociality and how “vernacular knowledge and culture reach a level of being recognized”. In a 2022 installation of the work, visitors are invited to engage the research archive behind this work in an antechamber to the film. One of their research materials was a Brazilian documentary about frevo, a frenetic dance rooted in cultures of resistance to colonialism and slavery, recently consecrated as cultural heritage. In that film, bodies fill the street in a documentary about the roots of the dance, juxtaposed with contemporary citizen dancers. Curiously, the end credits cut between a meticulous accounting of everyone who worked on the film, and a single female dancer energetically performing on the steps of a building. She is unnamed and uncredited.
When Wagner and de Burca began their research, they:
were living close to an artisanal shop where young frevo dancers from the area would perform for tourists intermittantly, and we could always hear bars with frevo music playing. I said to Bárbara, “You know, it’s really nice to hear the music and know what’s happening but not see it and leave it to the imagination”.
Something of this discretion remains as a speculative impulse in the final work, challenging a simple politics of representation through the movement impulses of screendance. Leonel Brum cites Ana Paual Nunes, speaking to the significance on screendance in Brazillian culture, “videodance is a privileged space for the debate on body representation in contemporary society”. This presentation discusses that work and the significance of the companion archive to expand the affective circuits of screendance into questions of the anarchival impulses of screendance.
3:00–4:00 p.m. — Session II Feminist Curating, Digital Platforms, and Audiovisual Heritage
Moderator: Julia Minne
Practising Feminism through Curating
Dr. Ylenia Olibet, Postdoctoral Researcher, English Department, McGill University
Through the history, mandate, and collection of the artist-run centre Groupe Intervention Vidéo (GIV), based in Montreal, Ylenia Olibet will explore how the GIV constitutes a living archive of transnational feminist histories and embodied media practices. Dr. Olibet will focus in particular on the preservation and curatorial practices surrounding feminist and queer archives at the GIV as a way of responding to the creative needs and desires of communities, while promoting the visibility and remuneration of independent and underrepresented audiovisual artists.
Valuing and Preserving “Fragile” Cinemas Online
Naomie Décarie-Daigneault, Artistic Director, Tënk.ca, an online subscription platform for creative documentaries
The act of programming films is deeply situated and shaped by specific cultural and institutional contexts. In order to reflect on the many issues underlying the selection and promotion of films, this presentation examines Tënk, a documentary streaming platform available across Canada. Through a reflection on the new possibilities offered by digital distribution spaces, it considers the feminist approach that guides and structures its programming, while also addressing the biases and challenges that shape the kinds of cinema it presents. Today, Tënk is positioning itself as a “cinémathèque” for documentary film, becoming a repository for alternative histories and perspectives emerging from independent cinema, with a particular focus on “fragile” cinemas that require appropriate forms of contextualization and promotion.
5:30 p.m. — Screening at Cinéma Public
Bodies in Resistance — Special Screening
cinemapublic.ca/films/corps-en-resistance
Location: LEA B46, McGill University
2:00–4:00 p.m. — Special Lecture and Screening
Moderator: Prof. Alanna Thain, English Department, McGill University
Preservation and Decolonialities: Restitution and Sharing of Latin American Audiovisual Memory
Prof. Nicholas Andueza, Department of Communication, PUC-Rio
This paper explores notions and principles of restitution currently being put into practice by the Latin American Film Restitution Initiative, led by Paolo Tosini and Nicholas Andueza. Launched in 2025 and connected to the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Imágenes en Movimiento (CLAIM), the Initiative brings together a six-person group dedicated to conceptualizing restitution and repatriation within the Latin American and digital contexts of audiovisual memory.
In addition to describing the group’s activities, current projects, structure, and potential future initiatives, the presentation will consider more broadly the meaning of restitution in today’s digital world and its particular implications within the Latin American context.
4:00 p.m. — GIV Film Screening and conclusion
Presentation: Ylenia Olibet, Postdoctoral Researcher, McGill University
Julia Minne, Postdoctoral Researcher, McGill University
REPORTAGE BRÉSIL / UPDATE BRAZIL
Nancy Marcotte and Colette Loumède
Documentary | Quebec | 1986 | French
In 1985, in São Paulo, Brazil, the first police station entirely managed and operated by women was established. Primarily created to address domestic violence and sexual assault, the 25 existing stations also provide social and legal assistance. This initiative marked an important moment in women’s access to these services in Brazil.
AXÉ
Maria Angélica Lemos and Marcia Meireles
Documentary | Brazil | 1988 | Portuguese / English version
Originally produced for the centennial commemoration of the abolition of slavery in Brazil, this videotape is far from a celebratory anniversary piece. It reveals the persistence of anti-Black prejudice in a society that has historically portrayed itself as a racial democracy. The film explores the diversity of Black culture and its profound influence on-and appropriation by-white Brazilian society.