Paper short abstract:

The film “O Compasso” is a central output of the research project POCI/SOC/58668/2004 “Transformações sociais numa colectividade local do Noroeste Português”, financed by the Foundation for Science and Technology/Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education and coordinated by José Madureira Pinto, of the Institute of Sociology/University of Porto. The research consisted of a sociological revisit of a local community in Northwest Portugal that was first studied around thirty years ago.

Paper long abstract:

Thirty years after a pioneer study conducted by young sociologists concerned with the scientificity of their approach and with the ethical implications of the relation established between researchers and the studied communities, the same sociologists return to Fonte Arcada, a small parish in Northwest Portugal, leading a renewed and enlarged team, in order to put forward an ambitious sociological revisit, which tries to create, in fact, a small laboratory where the social transformations that the country has experienced in the last thirty years can be analised.

The camera, the recorder, and the eye of a small film crew were invited to follow and somehow reflect on the research process and the research project as as a whole as it went on. Fonte Arcada was the stage and O COMPASSO intends to be the visual trail of an encounter and of the subsequent confrontation of different points of view - the one proposed by the sociologists, the one proposed by the film makers and the one proposed by the members of the studied community. But also of the overlapping movements of these different images.