Rioters: Unruly Images and Freedom Experiments with Patrícia Freitas

The Institute of the Arts and Sciences invites you to a screening of three short films by Patrícia Freitas about women and incarceration in Brazil, followed by a conversation with the filmmaker.

Fleeing Firminas features moments of women inside the Women’s Penal Complex of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil participating in the creative writing workshops .

Fleeing Roquelina follows writer Dona Roquelina’s release from prison.

Rioters is an in-production feature-length documentary that begins in the Lemos de Brito Penitentiary in Salvador and tells the stories of Black women from the post-abolition era in old Bahia to the present day; women who dared and continue to dare to occupy spaces that, though still hostile to them today, allow their art, knowledge, and ancestral power to resonate.

Patrícia Freitas, documentary filmmaker, holds a master’s degree in literature and culture from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), and is an associate researcher at PAVIC—Researchers in Audiovisual Media, Iconography, and Content. In over two decades of work, she has directed documentaries such as Ira (2004) on religious racism, which received an honorable mention at Cinesul (2005) and the Ibero-American Film and Video Festival (2005) and was screened at the Ethnographic Film Festival (2005), Negros em Movimento (2005), about Black theater in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro; and Enquanto te espero, a luz coalhou (2018), a poetic documentary screened at the Arqfilm Festival in Santiago, Chile, and Puebla, Mexico, among others. In recent years, she has worked as an assistant director on the series Enredos da liberdade (dir. Luis Carlos de Alencar), currently streaming on Globoplay, and as a researcher for the series Histórias submersas (dir. Paulo Alcântara) and Todos os sonhos (dir. Sofia Federico), both aired on TVE Bahia, among others. She also served as an assistant to Joel Zito Araújo and Hermano Penna, leading figures in Brazilian cinema.