Film : LIGHTS CAMERA PICHACAO

Lights, Camera Pichação (100mins BR)
Director : Gustavo Coelho, Marcelo Guerra
Co-Director : Bruno Caetano
Offical Website

Sf Kino Fri 23.09 and Sat 24.09, 16:00. Tickets 60kr

First of all, “PICHAÇÃO” is not graffiti. It is something distinct – a phenomenon that only happens in Brazil. What a subversion it is to sign the whole city with your own made-up name, especially a city that seems not to be projected for you? The film is a chance to find in this aesthetic production, susceptible to be named as “crime”, fonts to think with audacity, the fragmentations and indifferences that constitute a huge part of the contemporary challenges for our society.

Street art has become an inherent element of urban landscape. In Rio de Janeiro. Pichação has evolved into a movement with it’s own principles and rules. An important characteristic of ‘Lights, Camera, PICHAÇÃO’ is the presence of only “pichadores” and “ex-pichadores”, excluding anyone that is not part of this culture, even specialists or intellectuals, seeing that it is the “pichador’s” voice, his forms of socialization, his histories, his meetings (“reús”), his folders, his missions, his typography, his successes, his risks, his losses, his profits – his everyday life. It’s the stories of urban youth – their everyday life: family, friends, jobs, passion and love. They are all the creators of the city they live in.

So, running away from the reduced explanations announced from outside of this culture, this documentary, focused especially on the “PICHAÇÃO” from Rio de Janeiro, well-known as “Xarpi Carioca”, proposes a companionship and a sympathy for what, at a first view is incomprehensible, and because of that, a justified target for violence. Family, jobs, friends, loves, risks, affects, street, city, dawn, in other words, a film that is interested, above all, in common afflictions of a contemporary peripherized and urban youth. How much of a “pichador” is inside of all of us?

The project started more or less by chance as research for a master’s degree but soon developed into a series of exciting and risky missions. The movie made by Gustavo Coelho, Marcelo Guerra and Bruno Caetano is a tribute to all of those who are or have been inside these battlefields that are the streets.