Paper short abstract:

This paper will set out the contours of an interdisciplinary approach to recent webdocumentaries (webdocs) from Brazil, particularly those which focus on urban issues including housing and forced evictions, and the 2013 protests which took place in the country.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will set out the contours of an interdisciplinary approach to recent webdocumentaries (webdocs) from Brazil, particularly those which focus on urban issues including housing and forced evictions, and the 2013 protests which took place in the country. Both of these themes relate to long-standing inequalities and tensions in urban Brazil as well as to more recent processes of social and urban change, including specifically the preparations for the upcoming World Cup (2014) and Olympic Games (2016) to be held in Brazil.

Although there is a long tradition of documentary filmmaking in Brazil and scholarship on this topic, this paper proposes that as elsewhere in the world, recent developments in digital technologies have occasioned changes in the processes, forms and user experience of documentary (Dovey and Rose 2013) in the country. One feature of webdocumentary in Brazil has been the involvement of groups, collectives and social organisations in the production of documentary material for dissemination on the internet. As well as film studies, it is therefore necessary to draw on scholarship on digital culture when researching Brazilian webdocumentaries. This is particularly the case in an interdisciplinary study aiming to consider the content of webdocs (as 'texts') alongside an analysis of the practices involved in their production, circulation and reception, by producers and audiences, including on video-sharing websites (such as YouTube and Vimeo) and social network sites (such as Facebook and Twitter). Drawing on work on circulation by Brian T.Edwards (2011), the aim is develop an approach to webdocumentary which is sensitive to both 'motion' and 'meaning'.