By MICHEL GOULART DA SILVA*

The 2004 “Festival Latinoamericano de la Clase Obrera (Felco), held in Buenos Aires, showed films from various social struggles in Latin America and promoted debates on political and audiovisual issues.

It was held just over twenty years ago, at the end of November 2004, the Latin American Festival of the Obrera Class (Felco), whose main screenings took place in the city of Buenos Aires. In addition to a public selection process, the festival had public screenings held throughout the year, featuring films from Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia and Mexico. Also present were the organizers of Labour Fest from San Francisco (United States) and South Korea.

Several debates were held on the subject of cinema, the political situation in Argentina and other countries, and women's issues, among others. In addition, the films and the issues raised in them were discussed after each screening. There was a large turnout of local people in the screenings held throughout the country, and the main screenings in Buenos Aires were attended by around four thousand people.

One of the members of the festival organization described, in a very illustrative way, the exhibitions in Buenos Aires: “The Felco posters pasted on the avenues and especially in the city's cinemas, the dozens of radio interviews carried out by different members of Worker's Eye, and the nearly one-page note on the same Thursday in the diary Page 12, gave this pioneering cultural-militant event an important diffusion and transcendence. (…) Thirty productions from seven Latin American countries, without respite, eight hours a day and for three days, were an eloquent example of the struggle of the Latin American peoples”.[I]

The festival, which had around four thousand spectators, was conceived by Worker's Eye, an activist audiovisual production group that existed at the time in Argentina. Several other organizations and filmmakers participated in its creation, including the Buenos Aires collective Indymedia, characterizing a very rich experience in the sense of a collective construction, even starting from different political and ideological points of view.

As part of the festival's local activities, according to the organizers, “meetings were held to discuss the conditions of production of our cinema”.[ii] The festival, among other things, was a space for discussion on policies and programs for the Argentine audiovisual sector, seeking to consolidate a network of cooperation between producers and militant film groups. It was understood that the resources needed to subsidize production and exhibition should be obtained from the State, through National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA).

The context in which FELCO was organized was marked by mobilizations all over the world, in a scenario opened by the Seattle mobilizations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in November 1999. In Latin America, as in other parts of the world, the main struggles waged by workers received special attention from groups of filmmakers.

In 2000, Ecuador was shaken by large-scale mass mobilizations led by the People's Parliament, a broad and democratic body for debate and deliberation, which had a large participation of the local population. An uprising on January 21 caused the collapse of the national government, even gaining the support of part of the Armed Forces. On that day, the People's Parliament was installed in the National Congress and elected a new government, the Junta de Salvación Nacional, controlled by Colonel Lucio Gutierrez.

However, claiming to respect the hierarchy of the Armed Forces, he handed over power to the high command of the military forces. Once constitutional order was restored, Lucio Gutierrez was elected president in 2002, only to be overthrown by popular discontent.

At the same time, students at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) held a ten-month strike against the university's tuition fees, winning part of their demands. This strike gained the support of Mexican workers and solidarity from around the world.

In Bolivia, the victorious struggle against the increase in water tariffs in April 2000 gave rise to organizations similar to the Ecuadorian People's Parliament, and also established the Movimento al Socialismo (MAS) and the coca grower leader Evo Morales, elected president in December 2005, as the main leaders of the country's left. Bolivia also returned to the political scene in 2003, initially with a series of strikes, including by the police, but mainly with the so-called "Bolivian October", against the transfer of control over the country's gas to foreign capital.

In December 2001, in Argentina, the episode known as argentinazo, when the piquetero movement, in unity with unions and left-wing organizations, overthrew the government of Fernando de la Rua. It was at that time that the Popular Assemblies were being formed, and it was during those days that the various presidents who took office in the country were overthrown by the force that came from the streets. Although the successive overthrow of presidents has stopped, the struggles in the country have never stopped happening, and have even intensified, whether in the unity between the “occupied” and the piqueteros, or in the occupations of factories.

At that time, in Venezuela, the persistent attempts by the United States to depose President Hugo Chávez proved fruitless, as the overwhelming majority of the population supported the president and the so-called Bolivarian Revolution. This was possibly the most important political process at the time in the region, although it was stalled by the limitations of its leadership and by pressure from imperialism.

In these political processes, groups of activists were formed who used cameras as their main objects of struggle. Some of the best known are part of the collectives of Indymedia. These collectives were present not only in Latin America, but also in the United States, their country of origin, and in Europe. In addition to written coverage, published on websites or in printed spaces such as newspapers, audiovisual reports of these struggles were also produced. Often, the collectives of Indymedia suffered some repression, an emblematic event being that which occurred in 2004, in Europe, when computer hard drives were seized by the FBI from two of the providers of the Indymedia.

In Brazil, the work of Carlos Pronzato, an Argentine living in Bahia, stood out, and he became known for his work on Bus Revolt, about the struggle of Bahian students against the increase in bus fares in Salvador, in 2003. Carlos Pronzato also made films about the factories recovered in Argentina, the homeless movement in Brazil, the struggles in Bolivia, the contradictory center-left government elected in Uruguay, among others.

However, it was in Argentina that the main process of organization of these groups could be observed. The various active groups (Worker's Eye, Counter image, Indymedia, Insurgent Cinema, Argentina Burns, among many others) were extremely heterogeneous. Another country that was marked by a set of audiovisual activist groups was Bolivia.

FELCO was a kind of apex in this process of organizing militant cinema groups. One of the goals of the meetings held at the first edition of the festival was to build an international network that would encompass the countries that were being represented.

From a more political point of view, the festival's final declaration stated that the crisis experienced by humanity was “the result of the decomposition of an exhausted social regime that can only find a way out of its terminal crisis through war and the oppression of peoples”.[iii] The role played by the main left-wing organizations in rescuing the institutions against which the mass mobilizations are opposed, as happened in Argentina and Bolivia, was also denounced.

The document also highlighted the role played by this same left in countries such as Brazil and Uruguay, where it diverted workers' discontent to the electoral arena, giving rise to governments whose policies were not consistent with the programs of the social movements they claimed to represent, and even collaborating “militarily with Bush in the occupation of Haiti.”[iv]

The filmmakers present at the plenary session spoke out in favor of “deepening the perspective opened up by popular rebellions by promoting an independent mobilization”, in the sense of building unity among the diverse struggles of workers (laborers, peasants, picketers, coca growers, women, etc.), seeking “a political solution of their own”.[v] Finally, they clearly define their role in these struggles: “We consider that our activity, militant cinema, is a concrete contribution to the revolutionary process. Our cameras must serve this objective.”[vi]

Another important fact to highlight was the international campaign carried out in support of FELCO, which received the support of around three hundred filmmakers, intellectuals, political organizations and social movements. Among others, Argentine filmmakers such as Fernando Birri and Otavio Getino, as well as Uruguayan Mario Handler, Brazilian João Batista de Andrade and British Ken Loach, signed in support of FELCO. The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) of Brazil, through its communications department, also signed the declaration. This campaign demanded logistical and financial support for the festival from INCAA. After great pressure, public events and signatures were collected, the response from the Argentine government's film agency came with great delay, making several promises, some of which were fulfilled.

A second edition of the festival was held in Bolivia at the end of October 2005, and a third in 2006 in Brazil, with screenings in São Paulo, in addition to a Brazilian edition of the festival. Under the impact of the Oaxaca Commune, those present at the final plenary session stated in December, in the final document of the 2006 edition: “[…] Oaxaca shows us that popular uprisings continue to sweep across Latin America, uniting ever broader sections of the population and appealing to methods of direct action. While millions of Latin Americans are plunged into poverty and unemployment, workers repeatedly come out to defend their living conditions, wages, democratic freedoms, the right to housing, land, and education.”[vii]

In the following years, the festival was held irregularly, although it reached its tenth edition, held in Argentina in 2016. The weakening of this initiative is largely associated with the so-called “wave of progressive governments” that marked Latin America. In this context, the very left denounced in statements at the festival became the government and, therefore, the manager of the social and economic crisis that was sweeping the continent.

The call for the tenth edition of 2016 stated: “The popular rebellions that swept the continent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, sweeping away the supporters of ‘neoliberalism’, did not achieve the goal of independence. The nationalist or center-left regimes that emerged after these rebellions exacerbated primary economies based on the plunder of natural resources, environmental pollution and precarious work. They were the celebration of polluting mining companies, the advance of soybeans, dependence on oil and the recognition of debt.”[viii]

FELCO was the product of an era of revolts and rebellions, portrayed on screen by its own participants. From the anti-imperialist uprising in Seattle, which spurred the creation of Indymedia, passing through the rebellions in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and other countries, a rebellious Latin America was seen through images captured by audiovisual filmmakers. In November 2004, meeting in Buenos Aires, these filmmakers brought to the screen what the major media outlets and even the official left, comfortable in their government positions, as in Brazil and Uruguay, tried to hide.

This erasure operation still remains in the official narratives, considering that more is said about the coalitions of left-wing parties with sectors of the bourgeoisie that rose to power in different countries than about the workers' rebellions that occurred across the continent in the early 2000s. These images, taken to movie theaters, are the legacy of a time when workers not only tried to build their own power but also sought to capture this perspective in images.

*Michel Goulart da Silva He holds a PhD in history from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and a technical-administrative degree from the Federal Institute of Santa Catarina (IFC).

Notes

[I] Hernán Vasco. Impactful political and cultural event: 4000 people passed by Felco. Workers' Press, Buenos Aires, n. 879, 2 December 2004, p. 8.

[ii] Ojo Obrero. The path opens. Workers' Press, Buenos Aires, n. 871, 7 October 2004, p. 10.

[iii] Latin American Festival of the Obrera Class. Declaration, nov. 2004.

[iv] Latin American Festival of the Obrera Class. Declaration, nov. 2004.

[v] Latin American Festival of the Obrera Class. Declaration, nov. 2004.

[vi] Latin American Festival of the Obrera Class. Declaration, nov. 2004.

[vii] Declaration of the III Latin American Festival of the Working Class (FELCO), 10 December 2006.

[viii] Artists Front. Go back to Felco. Workers' Press, Buenos Aires, n. 1411, 18 May 2016.

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