Luiza Paula da Silveira did not imagine that she would be the victim of the first massacre in a public school when she woke up to get ready on April 7, 2011.
In addition to her, nine other girls and two boys had their lives taken by a 23-year-old man who entered the Tasso da Silveira Municipal School, in the neighborhood of Realengo, in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, with a gun, to attack the lives of students. The crime was the first of several attacks on Brazilian schools.
Bianca Lenti, director of documentaries such as “Fio do Afeto”, about a network of quilombola, indigenous and riverside women who created a production of masks in the Covid-19 pandemic, has teamed up with HBO Max to launch the series “Massacre na Escola: The Tragedy of the Girls of Realengo”. Here, she returned to look at women’s lives.
“Some media outlets gave [com esse foco]but the characteristic of feminicide had passed by”, explains Bianca Lenti to CNN about why I wanted to make the documentary.
“This theme [o feminicídio] it was not prioritized because it was a very new crime and everyone was in shock. What mattered was: who was the shooter? Why did he do it?”.
The crime had repercussions around the world. The victims’ families were so harassed, says Bianca, that there were those who moved to another city to get away from the case.
“When we get there, 11 years after the massacre and after they have worked through what happened a lot and are touching their lives in one way or another, they want to speak from their perspectives for the first time”, points out Bianca .
The director and the team gathered documents, went after the relatives and victims to tell the story from the perspective of femicide. Among the testimonies she heard, Bianca recalled the conversation with the father of a survivor, who was so traumatized by the girls who died on top of his body to the point of not being able to hug his own family anymore.
“It was one of the most impactful statements, because he said: ‘My daughter is here, I didn’t lose my daughter, my daughter is here with me. But nowadays, since what happened, I can’t hug and kiss my daughter, nobody can touch her,’” recalled the director.
According to the survey “Attacks of extreme violence in schools in Brazil”, by Unicamp, launched in March, the country recorded 23 attacks in the last 20 years.
The objective of Bianca Lenti’s documentary is to try to understand why a massacre like the one in the Realengo neighborhood took place – and the reason why several others were repeated again. The investigation by the director and her team showed that one of the reasons is hate speech, for example, on social networks.
“We saw the radicalization of this discourse in recent years, and access to weapons becoming easier only contributed to this phenomenon, unfortunately, becoming more frequent than we, as a society, would like”, pointed out Bianca.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m Robert Neff, a professional writer and editor. I specialize in the entertainment section, providing up-to-date coverage on the latest developments in film, television and music. My work has been featured on World Stock Market and other prominent publications.
