Abstract

This article aims to discuss the importance of the ComuniCurtas Film Festival, between 2006 and 2011, while investigating the social and academic impacts on the audiovisual production of Paraíba, located in the northeast of Brazil. Also, it seeks to understand the role of Brazilian public universities in the training of students and their role in the surrounding community.
The ComuniCurtas Film Festival, the object of our analysis, was born in 2006, at the State University of Paraíba, located in the city of Campina Grande, in the northeast region of Brazil, farther from the hegemonic and traditional cultural centers of the country. The festival is the result of a movement of students who saw in the event a cultural potential to stimulate audiovisual production in the region.
For this investigation, interviews were conducted with André da Costa Pinto, creator of the event, Marlene Alves Sousa, dean of the University that funded the festival, and some participating students. We also analyzed the festival’s catalogs, schedule and official documents, such as regulations and entry forms.
According to Marijke de Valck (2016), festivals are the “sites and occasions where discursive patterns emerge that teach us about film culture, aesthetics, politics, activism, cosmopolitanism, and its counter-movements” (De Valck, apud CESAR; COSTA, 2021, 152). ComuniCurtas shows this transformation that Public Universities in Brazil have, through the involvement of the territory and the community, in addition to providing training experiences that has the potential to bring protagonism and regional self-esteem, thus perpetuating local memory.