Overview of affirmative public policy for audiovisual in Brazil

10 years of the Curta Afirmativo production grant (2012-2022)

Abstract

The development of affirmative public policies aims to correct asymmetries of actions, resources and opportunities in a field. The confrontation against the disproportionate participation of black men and women in directing and scriptwriting roles in Brazilian cinema resulted in the first affirmative public policy instrument for audiovisual promotion in Brazil: “Curta Afirmativo”, implemented by the Ministry of Culture in November 2012. The initiative was questioned in court, but obtained a favorable decision, establishing benchmarks of the legitimacy of the affirmative policy for audiovisual in Brazil. In the subsequent decade, other instruments and actions were implemented and arenas mobilized around the issue. The objective of this research, in the light of the theoretical concept of intersectionality, is to present an overview of the instruments of affirmative public policy for cinema and audiovisual in Brazil in the ten years after the implementation of “Curta Afirmativo” (2012-2022). The research traces a timeline of the instruments mobilized at the federal level, showing characteristics of a gradual remodeling of affirmative public policies for the field. Although it was possible to verify significant contributions to the correction of gender and race asymmetries in the audiovisual, the analysis, mediated by the theoretical lenses of intersectionality, shows that the design of the policy produced certain distortions in its results, in comparison with the intended objectives. In this way, the findings lead to the conclusion of the need to improve the design of affirmative public policy for the audiovisual sector, through the objective addressing of the intersectional perspective, regarding the overlapping of gender and race clippings.