Bloco Afro and Afoxé:
Afro-Brazilian Carnival as a Political and Religious Stage
Official Selection
- Pan African Film Festival, Los Angeles
- San Diego Latino Film Festival
- Los Gatos Film Festival
- Festival de Cinema Pan Africano, Bahia
During the Carnival celebration of Bahia, in the northeast of Brazil, more than two million people take to the streets in an expressive cultural showcase of a region where eighty percent of the population is of African descent, and where strong elements of African culture have been preserved, also mixing with other cultural influences to create forms found nowhere else in the world.
Carnival is often portrayed as an inversion of the social order, an egalitarian never-never land in which the customary social concerns are temporarily suspended. Yet the stark inequalities of race and class that pervade Bahian society, where gradations of skin color form the basis of a rigid social pyramid, are far from absent in the pre-Lenten celebration.
Bloco Afro and Afoxé shows how black Bahians use Carnival as a stage for expressing critiques of the Euro-centric social and religious order.
© 2008 documentario.com