Afropop Worldwide

Belo Horizonte is Brazil’s sixth largest city and including its surrounding districts, the country’s third largest metropolitan area. The capital of Minas Gerais, a state built on mining, dairy products and coffee production, Belo Horizonte is often seen as a parochial, conservative backwater, yet its thriving alternative arts scene provides robust forms of musical and cultural resistance to the exclusionary policies of reactionary president, Jair Bolsonaro, especially through local variants of hip-hop and reggae. Produced in Belo Horizonte by David Katz, this program explores the intricacies of the city’s homegrown resistance movements, based in squatted buildings and public spaces in the city center and peripheral favelas on the outskirts. It reveals the surprising complexities of the renowned Belo Horizonte rap scene, which is intricately linked to improv theatre and urban poetry movements, with a revived Carnival culture, African-Brazilian Candomblé and baile funk all part of the local form’s very distinc