Garapa

Garapa follow the daily lives of three families living with food insecurity in Brazil. The title refers to the sugar water provided to the children when milk is not available (which seems to be often). The difficulty of daily life is plain to see, as families have to transport water from a nearby lake by donkey back to their simple homes, and speak of the challenges to find work and purchase even the most basic food items. The children, aside from being malnourished, lack clothing, education or really any stimulus, they appear to be simply existing.

This is an extremely intimate documentary, that doesn't flinch from the very harsh realities. There are no solutions here, and the film does not explore the broader social, economic, historical or political issues that no doubt underpin the situation. That is perhaps a weekness, but as a piece of pure ethnography, this hard to look away from. Beautifully shot in black and white, this is a film that is hard to forget.

Watching 4 beautiful and tragic documentaries denouncing the Brazilian problems, "Estamira", "Os carvoeiros" and this one, which I can't even say is the worst, because it involves hunger, severe poverty and many children. It is worth mentioning that public policies save us, and the control and support of multi-mix flour (although currently controversial). The only flaw in the documentary denouncing it was the lack of subtitles, given the unclear sound, many of the testimonies are lost due to external factors...

According to the UN, more than 920 million people suffer from chronic hunger in the world. The meaning of these numbers depends on our understanding of what it means to go hungry. Generally, the media discusses hunger from a macroscopic perspective. They provide us with numbers and debates about its environmental, geographic, economic and political causes. However, they leave us without knowing how people who go hungry live. In order to understand the real meaning of hunger, it is necessary to spend some time with people who struggle with hunger. It is necessary to follow their daily lives.