Landless Worker's Movement Hosts Screening

On October 15th, I had the extreme honor of presenting A Little Bit of So Much Truth at the MST's popular education university Escuela Nacional Florestan Fernandez (ENFF). The MST (Movimiento Sin Tierra, or Landless Workers Movement) has a long history of carrying out land occupations across Brazil, but also of using the occupied land not only for farming and housing, but also as sites of popular education and movement building.

In 2005, the MST founded the ENFF with the mission of providing a space where social movements and organizations from across Latin America could participate in a popular education process towards building political formation. This August, they started their first semester, with over 90 students attending from across Latin America, as well as Haiti and Mozambique.

Showing the film at the school was an amazing experience, because there were literally over 90 representatives from social movements all over Latin American, the Caribbean, and Africa. The discussion took place in a mix of Spanish and Portuguese (I think the Haitians were struggling as the only participants who didn't come from Spanish or Portuguese speaking countries). So there was lots of debate...about organizing tactics, about taking power vs. building an alternative, about indigenous assemblies, about the relationship of other social movements to the APPO. The debate was supposed to have ended by 10 pm, but was still going strong at 11:30 pm.