🗓 Saturday 5 December | Doors 7pm | Screening 7.30pm
📍 Pelican House, 144–148 Cambridge Heath Road, London E1 5QJ
⏱ Running time: approx. 80 min, plus Q&A with director Gabriel Silvestre | 12+ | English subtitles
From quilombos pushed off their land by agribusiness to city centres sold off to developers, the same question keeps coming back: who gets to stay?
Quilombos were founded by people who escaped slavery and built free communities in the forests and hinterlands of Brazil. A century after abolition, the 1988 Constitution finally recognised their right to their land. Most are still waiting for it. Meanwhile agribusiness advances, and the courts move slowly.
In the cities, the struggle takes another form. Across Latin America, working-class communities are pushed to the edges while city centres are handed to developers, gated communities and speculation. In Brazil, housing movements occupy empty buildings in a country with more empty homes than families without one. Their demand goes beyond a roof. As the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre put it, it is the right to the city: the right to shape where and how we live.
We close the festival in the East End, a place that knows this question well. For centuries it has been a first home for people arriving from elsewhere: Huguenots, Irish, Jewish and later Bangladeshi communities, each pushed to the margins and each fighting for its place. In the 1970s, facing racist housing policies and violent attacks, Bengali families organised and occupied empty homes across Spitalfields and Whitechapel. They won the right to stay. Today the pressure comes from elsewhere, as gentrification and luxury development spread east from the City and Canary Wharf and price out the communities that made these streets. From Rosário to Belo Horizonte to Tower Hamlets, the fight over who gets to stay is the same fight.
Territórios de Resistência (Territories of Resistance)
Dir. Hermes Leal | Brazil | 2026 | Documentary | 19 min
Descendants of enslaved people who escaped and built free communities, the Rio Preto Quilombola community is now being driven off its ancestral land by agribusiness. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution promised quilombos their land. Most are still waiting.
Um Lugar na Cidade (A Place in the City)
Dir. Gabriel Silvestre | UK & Brazil | 2026 | Documentary | 61 min
The right to the city is not just a roof. It is the right to shape where and how we live. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre, the film follows three struggles against displacement in Latin America. In Rosário, residents defeat a gated community and win their land. In Santiago, they build social housing in the city centre themselves. In Belo Horizonte, housing movements organise on the periphery. From Latin America to London, this is a fight we all share.
Stay for a chat after! Gabriel Silvestre joins us in person for a Q&A after the screening.
