Film Screening: “Marighella” - Conversation with Maria Marighella

Date: 

Thursday, November 4, 2021, 6:00pm


For a recording of this conversation, please click here.

Speaker: Maria Marighella, City Council member of Salvador, Bahia; Carlos Marighella's grandaughter
Moderated by: Sidney Chalhoub, Professor of History and African and African-American Studies, Harvard University
Discussants: Cristiane Soares, Senior Preceptor in Portuguese, Harvard University and Eduarda Araujo, P.h.D. candidate, Department of African and African American Studies and History, Harvard University

One of the most acclaimed Brazilian film productions of 2019, “Marighella” depicts the life of Carlos Marighella, a Black Brazilian communist guerrilla fighter considered the number one enemy of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Marighella led an urban, armed offense against the military dictatorship that persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and murdered opposition politicians and activists throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The film, directed by renowned Brazilian actor and director Wagner Moura, was an adaptation of the acclaimed biography by journalist Mário Magalhães, Marighella – O Guerrilheiro que Incendiou o Mundo.

Maria Marighella was elected City Councilor of Salvador, Bahian by the Workers' Party (PT) in November 2020, with 4,837 votes. Born in Salvador, on January 16, 1976, Marighella is an actress with a degree from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). She joined the Workers Party (PT) in February 2020, after a long trajectory in governments led by the PT, at the federal and state levels, as manager of public policies for culture. She was the Theater Coordinator for the Cultural Foundation of the State of Bahia (Funceb) and the National Foundation of Arts (Funarte), as well as Director of Cultural Spaces of the Department of Culture of the State of Bahia (Secult/BA), having accumulated over ten years of experience in the management of cultural policies and contributed to various institutions in the country.

Sidney Chalhoub is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He taught at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, for thirty years before coming to Harvard in the fall of 2015. His research and writing focus mainly on the social history of Brazil in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with emphasis on the history of slavery, race, public health, and the literature of Machado de Assis, a writer of African descent widely regarded as the most important Brazilian novelist of all times. He published five individual books, three of them on the social history of Rio de Janeiro: Trabalho, lar e botequim (1986), on working-class culture in the early twentieth century; Visões da liberdade (1990), on the last decades of slavery in the city; and Cidade febril (1996), on tenements and epidemics in the second half of the nineteenth century. He also published Machado de Assis, historiador (2003), about the literature and political ideas of Machado de Assis. His most recent book is A força da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (2012), on illegal enslavement and the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. Chalhoub has also co-edited five other volumes on the social history of Brazil. At Harvard, he teaches courses on slavery, race, literature, and theories and methodologies of history, besides a lecture course on the History of Brazil, from Independence (1822) to the Present.

Presented in collaboration with the Portuguese Program, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard UniversityAfro-Latin American Research Institute Brazilian Women´s Group and Digaaí.