Research reveals that Black people are excluded from national cinema.

Black women* are not on movie screens, nor behind the cameras. Research from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Uerj) shows that Black and mixed-race women did not appear in the highest-grossing national films. Despite being the majority of the country's female population (51,7%), Black women appeared in less than two out of every ten feature films between 2002 and 2012. Furthermore, Black and mixed-race actresses represented only 4,4% of the main cast in national films. During this period, none of the more than 218 highest-grossing national films had a Black woman as director or screenwriter.

Coordinated by the Institute of Social and Political Studies (Iesp) of Uerj, one of the most renowned centers for political science studies in Latin America, the research The Face of National Cinema This suggests that film productions do not reflect the reality of the country, since 53% of Brazilians self-identify as Black or mixed-race, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The problem, according to the study's authors, lies in the influence of certain values ​​on the audience.

“According to the data, the Brazilian population is diverse, but this diversity does not translate to positions of power and greater visibility,” said one of the authors, master's student Marcia Rangel Candido. She adds that, in addition to “total exclusion” from technical positions, representation in the workforce is limited to stereotypes associated with poverty and crime. “White women hold various types of jobs, come from various social classes, and there is greater diversity,” she emphasizes.

Doctoral candidate Verônica Tofte, co-author of the research, says that the low representation of women in higher positions in cinema – they occupy 14% of directing positions and 26% of screenwriting positions among the most-watched films – in addition to the invisibility of Black women in the cast, are distortions of society. “The absence of women, especially Black women, in these roles generates low representation and reproduces an unrealistic view of Brazil.” According to the research, none of the directors or screenwriters among the films studied were Black.

To arrive at the racial profile, the research compared images of 939 actors, 412 screenwriters, and 226 film directors, excluding documentaries and children's films. "We used an identification model in which the researcher defines the racial group to which the subject belongs," explained Marcia. For the classification and comparison, a scale of eight photos of individuals, from the whitest to the blackest, established in previous scientific works, was used.

The list of most-watched films during the period comes from the National Film Agency (Ancine), an organization that, according to award-winning Black filmmaker Joel Zito Araújo, should play an active role in promoting diversity in audiovisual media. Assessing the Iesp research, he said the agency needs to act. "Only those who govern, who have the power to create public policies, can create paradigms for the nation and resolve this profound distortion," he said.

Despite having the function of promoting and regulating the sector, when contacted, Ancine stated that it "does not comment on the content of films, cast, or anything of that nature."

* It has become conventional to refer to the sum of the Black and Brown population groups as "Black," following the classification of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).