AN ADVENTURE CALLED BRAZIL

This is a road movie on dirt and surfaced tracks, an adventure in search of a united and sustainable Brazil. Confronted with the global problems of the century, the “land of the future”, as Stefan Zweig called it, has launched a vast programme of social projects and multiplied micro-experiments in education, access to water and the fight against deforestation. In Héliopolis (São Paulo), the largest horizontal favela in Brazil, a music school allows children and teenagers to enter the elitist and closed world of symphonic music. Under the impetus of civil society and thanks to the private funds of companies, another way of conceiving education for the masses! In the distant Nordeste, we meet Zé Roberto. He is like Zorro. Using the power of the sun, he produces water and, with the water, he makes peppers. He drives us through the Sertão to São João of the Dust where he helps women farmers to produce “above ground” without water evaporation. They earn four times more than when they were making brooms and have regained their dignity. In an Amazonian state near Peru, the local government is fighting against the expansion of cattle farming and offers an alternative to the forest peoples with a wild latex condom factory! To fight HIV, the federal government buys the whole production and distributes these “forest condoms” at every carnival. In the land of Chico Mendes, an icon of green consciousness, people thus pay a better price for rubber tree sap than the tyre industry. One of the sequences shows the Social and Environmental Stock Exchange, an initiative of the São Paulo Stock Exchange that encourages hundreds of citizen organizations financed by the private sector. Far from preconceived ideas, this is a laboratory country, a hotbed of the future that exports its ideas!