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In July, 2002, Guerrilla News Network was invited to lead a workshop with video production students at the 34th UFMG Winter Festival in Diamantina, Brasil. The goal of the workshop was to conceive, shoot, edit and design a video for exhibition at the end of the Festival. O Ciclone Lento e Sutil (The Quiet and Subtle Cyclone) was produced by GNN with 17 students using 3 mini DV cameras and 1.5 Final Cut Pro edit stations over a 10 day period.

The Quiet and Subtle Cyclone is a design-enriched investigation of the process and effects that authoritarian regimes have on the citizenry. Using the government of Argentinian General Jorge Videla as a case study, our work focused on three specific scenarios, namely: the loss of language and the freedom to communicate, the loss of citizenship (exile) or familiar territory, and the loss of identity or sanity.

Cyclone is a visual triptych that was based on the work of Marcelo Brodsky, an Argentinian photographer who’s show, Buena Memoria, has toured the world over the past year. Using his insights and photographs as a foundation, the class visited three sites that were in close proximity to the Festival and shot mini documentaries that were then linked by the Brodsky footage. His extrapolation of the concept of ‘disappearance’ (as the people murdered by the regime came to be described) enables the video to create a compelling and startlingly emotional journey into the local environs of the Brasilian countryside. Proving that we are all, in some way, a part of the ‘disappearing’ of our own social freedoms, constructs and traditions.

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GNN