Rhythmic Uprising @ MCCLA

Rhythmic Uprising
a documentary film about social change in Bahia

Screening, Performance and Discussion
Saturday, July 25 2009 3-6pm $7
MCCLA Theater

Part of the 13th annual Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival

Special performance by:
BA*TU*KE

Rhythmic Uprising is a documentary by filmmaker Benjamin Watkins that shows how the transformative powers of Afro-Brazilian performing arts are used to fight racism and inequality in Bahia, Brazil.

Around the world, the celebrated Afro-Brazilian region of Bahia is known for it's vibrant dance and music manifestations. This film takes a look behind the scenes of those grandiose carnaval spectacles to see how local cultural leaders utilize these arts to change lives.

Bahia boasts the largest concentration of african descendants outside of Africa. As shown in Rhythmic Uprising, Brazil's blacks have used Afro-Brazilian cultural conventions to maintain their African heritage and wage war on poverty, racism, and oppression over the last four centuries. As freed slave communities called 'quilombos' did during the time of slavery, cultural leaders featured in the film are dismissing the racist, unbalanced power structures of modern Brazilian society by organizing their own microcosms. They cultivate social institutions based on equality and African heritage that function as refuge for at-risk black youth. In contrast to larger Brazilian society, these groups empower and encourage their youth to pursue brighter futures.

Rhythmic Uprising is a Brazil-USA coproduction. Cultural projects featured in the film include an all-women drum corps named DiDá, a circus group heavily rooted in Afro-Brazilian expressions named Circo Picolino, a theater group that portrays African myths named Bejé Eró and a Capoeira Angola association named ACANNE. Historical Afro-Brazilian cultural conventions featured in the film include capoeira, candomblé, quilombos, afoxês, and blocos afros.

www.rhythmicuprising.org
www.mcmf.org

Mission Cultural Center Latino
2868 Mission St btwn 24th & 25th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 821-1155
missionculturalcenter.org