‘The festival is ours’: Power dynamics of community participation in the Alter do Chão Film Festival

Abstract

Although festivals are often promoted as opportunities for community empowerment, power dynamics during festival organization might hinder such potential. To discuss this issue, this article examines the Alter do Chão Film Festival (FestAlter), an originally collaborative project in the touristic village of Alter do Chão, Brazil. Through 16 interviews with festival stakeholders, the article unveils the changing power dynamics within the organization of the festival, and how these impacted the event's goals of community participation. I argue that the organization of this event moved from union to rupture among festival stakeholders – a trajectory caused by managerial divergences regarding the meaning of community participation and a lack of understanding of the history, culture and socioeconomic circumstances of Alter do Chão, an Amazonian village marked by enduring legacies of colonial exploitation.

Introduction

In October 2019, the small touristic village of Alter do Chão, commonly referred to as the ‘Caribbean of the Amazon’ (Moura, 2012), hosted the first Alter do Chão Film Festival (FestAlter), a week-long free event with 304 screenings of national and foreign films, 39 seminars with scholars and professionals of the Brazilian audio-visual industry and an evening programme with regional artistic performances. At the time of its first edition, FestAlter seemed to be a successful collaborative effort between two production companies – the Rio de Janeiro-based Krioca Comunicação and the local Borari Filmes – and various stakeholders from the region, such as Indigenous leaders, local policymakers and university professors. According to the festival's website, this was one of the main goals of the event: to be created through a ‘partnership of social leaderships, Indigenous ethnic groups, local producers, institutional partners … Amazonian thinkers, allied to popular wisdom’ (Festival de Cinema de Alter do Chão, n.d.). ¹ The emphasis on the inclusive and collaborative nature of FestAlter presented the event as an opportunity for community empowerment and participation.

In December 2020, though, an open letter accusing the festival organizers from Krioca of appropriation came to light. In the letter, 73 signatories – activists, scholars and members of the local cultural sector, among others – voiced their discontent with the course the festival seemingly took. As the letter explained, although the festival had originally been created in a collective manner, Krioca ended up taking full control over the event, which was evidenced by its 2020 online edition, executed entirely from the company's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. In response, the signatories demanded that the festival organizers should ‘respect the local and regional leading role in practice and not solely in discourse’ (Jornalistas Livres, 2020: para. 2), calling into question the festival brand that they had, until then, so proudly promoted.

The open letter against Krioca illustrates issues of community participation that are not uncommon to film and cultural festivals at large. Festivals are spaces where power dynamics are at play (Clarke and Jepson, 2011; Rüling and Pedersen, 2010; Walters et al., 2021) both within their organization (Loist, 2011; Rastegar, 2009) and between organizers and communities (Cudny, 2013; Ma and Lew, 2012). Although festivals are often promoted as opportunities for empowerment and social inclusion (Jordan, 2021), little research has been done to assess whether these proclaimed goals are effectively accomplished (Laing and Mair, 2015). In fact, the existing studies on the topic indicate that even in community-oriented festivals organizers might end up centralizing decision-making processes and alienating local constituencies (Clarke and Jepson, 2011; White and Stadler, 2017).

This study contributes to this discussion by analysing how stakeholders involved in the production of FestAlter 2019 evaluate the creation, planning and execution of the event in relation to the changing power dynamics within its organization, and how they see the implications of these power dynamics for the festival's goals of community empowerment and participation. Through 16 in-depth online interviews, I argue that the organization of this festival went through four phases (union, tension, conflict and rupture), moving from cooperation between multiple stakeholders towards an increasingly centralized administration, which ultimately resulted in a clear schism among original partners. This situation, in the perception of the interviewees, negatively compromised the festival's goal of community participation.

This article examines FestAlter at its organizational level – a line of investigation already suggested in the past (Rüling and Pedersen, 2010), but so far only scantily explored within film festival scholarship. More importantly, however, this article examines not only an original case study of a film festival in the Global South – a geographical focus receiving increasing attention by film festival scholars (Loist, 2016) – but also a film festival situated in a highly contested territory: the Brazilian Amazon. This further underpins FestAlter's empirical value, as it is hard not to draw parallels between the impasse surrounding the event and the exploitative practices that the region has historically experienced (Castro, 2005; Hecht and Cockburn, 2010; Heck et al., 2005). Therefore, understanding the inner workings of this new film festival and the resistance of sectors of Alter do Chão also allows us to reflect on how cultural events are embedded within larger power imbalances and identity politics rooted in a place's (colonial) history and heritage.

Festivals, communities and power dynamics

Even though festivals have traditionally been considered phenomena where tension and power dynamics are inherently present (see Bakhtin, 1984; Turner, 1974), it is only recently that the power dynamics occurring in practice in these events have gained academic attention (Walters et al., 2021). Festivals involve complex networks of stakeholders, including for example, festival organizers, policymakers, local communities, the tourism industry and the audience (Rüling and Pedersen, 2010). These stakeholders interact and negotiate their interests in the various decision-making processes in the production of a festival (Adongo and Kim, 2018), trying to ‘utilize the symbolic capital of the event for their own ends’ (Crespi-Vallbona and Richards, 2007: 292).

Research has shown that festivals can bring various positive benefits to communities, from economic gains and job creation to community-building and improvements in residents’ well-being (see e.g. Gibson et al., 2011; Litvin et al., 2013; Yolal et al., 2016). A festival's capacity to promote and sustain such benefits is believed to be dependent on the compatibility of festival stakeholders’ interests (Frisby and Getz, 1989; Richards, 2007) and on stakeholders feeling empowered throughout the making of the event (Bostock et al., 2016). Empowerment – understood here as ‘the ability of individuals and groups to act in order to ensure their own well-being or their right to participate in decision-making that concerns them’ (Calvès, 2009: II) – can occur within the festival organization, with festival workers feeling control and autonomy in decision-making, and between festival organizations and communities, with festival organizers listening to local stakeholders and allowing them to take ownership of the event (Walters et al., 2021). A widely advocated strategy in festival literature, fostering community participation is considered to enable the long-term sustainability of these events (Bostock et al., 2016), as long as the engagement of festival organizers with communities is extended over time (Kaplan et al., 2004; Stadler, 2013).

However, although festivals often utilize the rhetoric of social inclusion and empowerment in their promotion (Jordan, 2021), they often fail to put this discourse into practice. For instance, power inequalities within a festival organization might result in precarious cultural work (Loist, 2011) and managerial clashes regarding the mission and identity of the event (Rastegar, 2009). In their relationship with communities, festival organizers can centralize power, alienate community members (Clarke and Jepson, 2011; White and Stadler, 2017), ² commodify their cultural heritage and neglect local needs (Cudny, 2013; Ma and Lew, 2012; Quinn, 2005). The challenge of engaging with communities is also to do with their ‘fundamentally pluralistic nature … constantly changing over time and pulsing with conflict’ (Lucas, 2014: 277). The heterogeneity of communities complicates attempts at stimulating participation, since it might be difficult to cater to all diverse groups and competing interests therein. Finally, the very notion of empowerment has been criticized for having been co-opted in mainstream development rhetoric, being used ‘not as a mechanism for social transformation, but rather as a means to increase efficiency and productivity while maintaining the status quo’ (Calvès, 2009: XII). As Laing and Mair (2015) suggest, it is worth analysing if this co-optation of progressive discourses on community empowerment might also occur in the context of festivals.

In the case of FestAlter, such issues become even more pressing given the festival's geographical and historical specificity. FestAlter takes place in Alter do Chão, a district of the city of Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon. The village experiences various socioeconomic and environmental issues, such as tourism-led gentrification, land grabbing (Aragão, 2020), and illegal fires for the expansion of agribusiness (Cambraia et al., 2022) – exploitative practices that derive, in great part, from the region's colonial legacies. If, in the 16th century, European colonizers ravaged the Amazon in violent ‘civilizing’ missions (Hecht and Cockburn, 2010), years later Brazilian elites have continued to impose various social, economic and political agendas while disregarding the interests of its native populations (Heck et al., 2005), performing what has been described as ‘Brazilian internal colonialism’ (Castro, 2005: 4). The recent Bolsonaro administration has deepened the hardships in the region, with record deforestation rates (Oliveira, 2020) and the wrecking of the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI), the governmental agency aimed at protecting the culture and interests of Indigenous peoples in Brazil (Borges, 2020).

The vulnerabilities experienced by Alter do Chão make the village comparable to other sensitive locations targeted for cultural projects in Brazil. Previous research on film-related initiatives developed in such places demonstrated that these projects often bring only temporary benefits to the communities involved, failing to live up to their wishes and expectations (Póvoa et al., 2019, 2021). Some of the reasons for this are the positioning of these locations outside the country's creative hubs in the Southeast region, which results in such initiatives being carried out by ‘outsider’ creative workers who only engage with communities for a short period of time, and the non-prioritization of local circumstances in the creation and execution of these projects (Póvoa et al., 2021). Even though the organizers of FestAlter seemed to avoid such pitfalls by proposing collaboration with the Alter do Chão community, they still faced local resistance and conflict, as expressed in the open letter against them. Analysing this festival thus advances our understanding of the fragility of cultural and creative initiatives in vulnerable locations, offering important insights to policymakers and cultural managers willing to operate in contexts marked by enduring legacies of colonial exploitation.

Methods

The data for this study was collected between December 2020 and March 2021. It consists of 16 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with various stakeholders involved, in different levels and at different stages, in the production of FestAlter 2019. Due to the travel restrictions and health concerns imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, all interviews were conducted online via Zoom or WhatsApp video call.

The respondents can be divided into three groups. The first group consists of three interviewees who were part of the core group of organizers of FestAlter 2019, namely two members of Borari Filmes and one filmmaker who acted as content director of the festival in that year. The second group are people who were originally involved in the conception of the festival but either lost touch with the main organization or had a more detached participation in the process, for example by providing institutional or logistical support. These include university professors, local cultural producers and the current Secretary of Culture of Santarém. Finally, the third group consists of people who helped the main organizers, either on a paid or voluntary basis, during the festival days. These interviewees have a different experience and perception of the festival when compared to the core producers, since they did not participate in decision-making processes so extensively. Respondents pertaining to this group are volunteers, the presenter and the set designer of FestAlter 2019, as well as the person responsible for the liaison between the festival and local schools. As an additional method, participant observation during the festival's first edition (21–27 October 2019) was carried out, and the festival's subsequent online edition (9–13 December 2020), its website and the open letter were also analysed. This data was mainly used to inform the interviews and provide contextual information for the two editions of FestAlter when necessary.

The analysis of the interviews is divided into three sections. In the first, the original goals and philosophy of FestAlter, as described by the interviewees, is laid out. Then, the specific issue of community participation within the first edition of FestAlter, which emerged as a central concern regarding the management of the festival, is discussed. The last section deals with the current tension regarding the accusation of appropriation against organizers from Krioca, focusing on the respondents’ experience with the online edition of FestAlter.

Imagining FestAlter: uniting for a participatory project

FestAlter started off as a collective project involving three main stakeholders: the Federal University of the West of Pará (UFOPA), the local government (at city and state level) and Krioca Comunicação, a small business and communication consultancy company from Rio de Janeiro headed by photographer and filmmaker Locca Faria. University professors had already initiated talks about having a film festival in the region back in 2017, conceptualizing the event's aims and approach together with federal legislator Airton Faleiro, mentioned by many respondents as a key figure in securing public funding for FestAlter 2019. In 2018, Faria and his two partners from Krioca joined this group, expanding Krioca's portfolio – so far mainly focused on marketing, web design and audio-visual production – into the realm of film festival organization. From the perspective of local partners, Krioca would facilitate the production of FestAlter, in particular due to Faria's connections to professionals and potential partners from the Brazilian film industry.

Even with the participation of producers from Krioca – ‘outsiders’ in the eyes of other organizers and residents of Alter do Chão – the plan was to have a festival produced for and, most importantly, with the local community. In order to strengthen the ties with Alter do Chão – and to be able to apply for funding mechanisms at state level that demanded a local partner – Faria encouraged a small local group to create the production company Borari Filmes, which became the co-producer of FestAlter 2019. According to members of Borari Filmes interviewed for this study, the festival was an incentive for them to invest in their latent aspiration to work in film and event production. ³ In the context of the festival, Borari Filmes would act as a mediator between the organizers from Rio de Janeiro (who, despite long stays on location, could not be there at all times) and the village of Alter do Chão, bridging the distance of more than 2600 km between these two groups. However, including a local partner in the organization was not the only way the creators of FestAlter envisioned community participation. As the interviews revealed, community participation was understood in the original project of FestAlter as two interrelated efforts: including the community in decision-making processes and equipping locals to work in the Brazilian audio-visual sector.

The creators of FestAlter wanted to construct the event in a collective manner, giving residents of Alter do Chão opportunity to voice their opinions in public meetings. This ‘collective methodology’, as some respondents called it, would ensure that the festival ‘would … have our face [and] our voices’, ⁴ as the president of the Santarém Theatre Association (ATAS), Alenilson Ribeiro, explains. In order to achieve that, the production of FestAlter should allow for ‘knowledge exchanges between the people from there [referring to Krioca] and who is here’, as Alenilson elaborates. Therefore, the creators of FestAlter envisioned the festival as an open and democratic space for dialogue between organizers and community.

Besides promoting community participation during the planning phase, the creators of FestAlter also wanted to engage with the community of Alter do Chão during the festival days through audio-visual seminars, workshops and business rounds. The seminars and workshops would teach Amazonian residents the different elements of filmmaking, ⁵ equipping them to work in the audio-visual industry and potentially encouraging the development of an audio-visual hub in the region. In the business rounds, local producers would pitch their audio-visual projects to big players from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. These activities aimed at connecting Amazonian filmmakers with Brazilian film and TV professionals operating in the country's main creative hubs. Even though the creators of FestAlter ultimately wanted to foment a local audio-visual industry, there was an understanding that having access to the country's already-established audio-visual economy in the Southeast region was an important first step. FestAlter would thus give Amazonian filmmakers access to markets and networks that were still difficult for them to reach.

These two strategies were part of a long-term objective: to prepare these residents to, at some point, produce FestAlter on their own, as UFOPA's professor Jackson Rêgo asserts: ‘[The idea] was to allow for the Alter do Chão community and the riverside, Indigenous, caboclo and quilombola ⁶ communities to take over the direction of this festival in the future.’ This confirms FestAlter's ideal of community empowerment, with the prospect of the Alter do Chão community literally taking ownership of the festival in the future. This would also tackle the persistent issue of discontinuity in the region. As many participants argued, Alter do Chão is often targeted for projects conducted by ‘outsiders’ – projects that take place there and go away without leaving any concrete legacy for the region. Therefore, FestAlter ‘[could] not be a festival like any other festival’, as Fernando Mamari, content director of FestAlter 2019, remembers. By giving locals the means to take charge of the festival in the future, FestAlter should become a continuous event, breaking the enduring pattern of temporary cultural events with no lasting benefits for the community.

As the interviews show, the conception of FestAlter was permeated by a strong sense of union, which should occur both between the festival's various organizing parties and between those and the Alter do Chão community at large. In this original project, local and ‘outsider’ producers should exchange knowledge and closely collaborate, while also letting residents of Alter do Chão participate in decision-making processes and providing them with the tools and networks to take ownership of the event in the future, resonating Walters et al.'s (2021) conception of empowerment in festivals. This would guarantee that FestAlter would leave a legacy for Alter do Chão, possibly even stimulating the development of a local audio-visual hub. However, once the project got off the drawing board, this ideal of union started to fade away, to the regret of many respondents.

FestAlter in practice: tensions and limited participation

The community of Alter do Chão was informed about FestAlter via public meetings held by the organizers throughout 2018 and 2019, during which residents, leaders of cultural associations, and Indigenous, quilombola and activist groups were consulted about various aspects of the festival. ⁷ Interviewees who were at the core of the organization emphasized their effort to listen to the residents and take their wishes for the event into account, despite the difficulty of dealing with such a diverse locality as Alter do Chão. According to content director Fernando Mamari, the organizers also tried to directly visit and talk to different stakeholders, for example, by visiting various Indigenous reserves, but catering to the different interests in such a heterogenous community was a challenge. At times, he recalls, the participation of certain ethnic groups or cultural associations in the festival provoked jealousy among members of other groups, and the organizers saw themselves in the middle of local conflicts: ‘[The festival] arrived at a context … where cultural agents … cultural production … [and] internal rivalries already existed. The festival was, in certain moments, almost a mediator [of these disputes].’

Another challenge mentioned by the core organizers of FestAlter 2019 was the lack of local enthusiasm for the project. Although most interviewees remember that the idea was warmly welcomed, some say that the community was suspicious at first, seeming to ask ‘Who are these [people] coming once again … to do something in the village and simply go away, and leave nothing [behind]?’, as Borari Filmes producer Laysa Mathias recalls, explaining that ‘[e]verybody has [this] same argument … about the activities developed here’. Laysa also highlights that many local associations only decided to take part in the festival once they saw it taking shape, and its potential to be successful: ‘We always invited the associations, but not all [of them] cared to participate. Close to the festival, they started to want to know more … where they were going to place their stand.… Saying “no” was most difficult.’

Participants not so ingrained in the festival organization, however, did not entirely acknowledge these efforts, noticing instead a hierarchization in the approach of the organizers towards the community. For example, pedagogue Rita Peloso, who acted as a liaison between the festival and local schools, questioned the extent to which the public meetings were collaborative, claiming that ‘the information [about the festival] was passed on, but not [really] discussed’. Moreover, some interviewees perceived that, instead of actively trying to include community members in decision-making processes, the core organizing group – particularly the team from Krioca – started to exclude certain sectors of the community. Some respondents who were involved in the first talks about the festival felt left out as the festival production progressed, which resulted in some of them deliberately distancing themselves from the festival for disagreeing with the way the project was being conducted. Even though a few respondents, like Municipal Secretary of Culture Luis Alberto Figueira and content director Fernando Mamari, claimed that FestAlter was constructed gradually and horizontally with the residents of Alter do Chão, others indicated that building FestAlter as a collaborative project did not fully materialize in practice, which greatly influenced how the festival took shape in October 2019.

Largely funded by regional bank Banpará and the federal Special Secretary of Culture and Ministry of Citizenship, FestAlter 2019 took place from 21 to 27 October 2019, at the Sairé Square, in Alter do Chão. The square was transformed into a film festival space, with three tents for film screenings, seminars and business rounds, a main stage for evening performances, and eleven stands offering food, Indigenous crafts and local products. The festival screened a variety of short, mid-length and feature films, among animation, documentary and fiction. About half were Brazilian productions and discussed subjects of environmental and Amazonian interest – a specific thematic focus included in the selection criteria by the festival's curators. FestAlter 2019 reportedly created more than a thousand direct and indirect jobs, injected R$491,000 (€109.571) ⁸ into the local economy of Alter do Chão and attracted an estimated audience of 30,000 people (Festival de Cinema de Alter do Chão, n.d.). During the day, a great part of this audience consisted of students from local schools visiting the event and watching films for educational purposes. The evening programme, which also included concerts and artistic performances, usually drew a wider segment of Alter do Chão residents.

Despite the arguable success of FestAlter 2019, respondents interviewed for this study criticize many aspects of its execution. While the festival attracted a large audience and ‘mobilized the entire city’, as volunteer Gabriela Carvalho remembers, the same level of participation at its organizational level was not noticed, except for the hiring of some people, for example, the local company Borari Filmes. In the end, valuing the Amazonian culture and collaborating with the Alter do Chão community remained a discourse rather than practice – a discourse that, as cultural producer Raphael Ribeiro posits, is attractive as a branding strategy:

This concept attracts many partners, especially partners from outside the Amazon, because the ‘Amazon theme’ … has a very large appeal and it's become even larger due to the anti-Amazon and anti-native peoples policies of the current federal government [the Bolsonaro government].… But I only agree that this is not a demagogy if these peoples are really involved in the process.… If you make a festival in the Amazon, you have to … give decision-making power to [them].

According to Raphael and other respondents, the organizers of FestAlter 2019 mainly used the ‘Amazon theme’ for its popularity in attracting investors and audiences, without truly accommodating the wishes of local populations or including them in the management of the festival, as originally promised. This is also reflected in the festival's activities. Although covering topics such as cinematography, screenwriting and documentary techniques, the offered seminars were mostly theoretical. Without hands-on workshops, FestAlter did not succeed in providing the tools for residents to work in audio-visual production, according to respondents. The business rounds, on the other hand, demanded a level of professionalization incompatible with the local reality. Volunteer Gabriela Carvalho elaborates that ‘the cinema here is amateur.… Even technical things, many people didn't know what they were, didn't even imagine they needed it [to pitch their ideas].’ These perceptions indicate that festival organizers did not fully understand or cater to the needs of Alter do Chão. According to cultural producer Raphael Ribeiro, this turned the festival activities into ‘illusory’ attempts at helping local filmmakers and film enthusiasts to start or advance their careers. A sign that this might have been the case is that not one of the interviewees knows if any project presented at the business rounds actually moved forward.

Despite the criticism, there is a sense that the first edition of the festival was an important event. Many mentioned, for example, that the festival gave the community of Alter do Chão access to cinema in the first place, since some of ‘the people who were at the festival had never seen a film on a big screen before’, as Anézio Martins, content producer of FestAlter 2019, explains. Other positive outcomes were socioeconomic gains, at least for the people directly involved in the festival, and the temporary visibility that it brought to Alter do Chão. Some interviewees perceived an increase in tourism during the festival days, emphasizing how all the hotels in the city were fully occupied. However, considering that October is also the high tourist season in the region, it is difficult to calculate how many tourists were there for generic tourist purposes and how many specifically came to visit the festival.

People who were closer to the core organization, such as Fernando Mamari and Secretary of Culture Luis Alberto Figueira, evaluated the first edition of FestAlter as ‘a victory’ and ‘top notch’, respectively. Other interviewees, though, and especially initial partners who felt excluded by the main organizers, claimed that the festival did not live up to its original project, as UFOPA's professor Raimunda Monteiro argues:

For [Krioca], involvement is to hire a [local] production company … to rent a house, to pay people that were [involved] in the production [of the event].… This conception of local involvement is wrong. It doesn't contribute to local empowerment. It doesn't contribute to the development of local leadership. Once more, it established an extractivist relationship around the brand ‘Alter do Chão’, around the narrative of recognition of the local culture [of the Amazon].

This quote summarizes two dimensions of power struggle at play in FestAlter, indicating conflicts within its organization and between the organizers and the community of Alter do Chão. First, there is a fundamental clash in managerial visions between the core organizers of FestAlter and some of the local partners regarding what community participation means. Already, from the first public meetings, the efforts by Krioca and Borari Filmes to include the Alter do Chão community did not seem enough for these initial partners, who noticed a top-down, rather than collaborative, approach in their relationship with the village. This group, whose members eventually distanced themselves from the festival organization, felt increasingly disempowered and, in their view, so did the Alter do Chão community at large. As the quote suggests, some interviewees liken the power dynamics within FestAlter 2019 to an exploitative relationship all too well-known to the inhabitants of Alter do Chão, based on appropriating the resources and popularity of the village without giving much in return. In their perspective, FestAlter 2019 ended up reproducing historical conflicts in the Amazon region and exemplifying the commodification of local identities, traditions and heritage disguised by the progressive rhetoric of community empowerment.

Therefore, instead of sustaining the ideal of union among different stakeholders, FestAlter created tensions among organizers and, for some respondents, only allowed for a limited engagement with the Alter do Chão community. Even though most respondents recognize that community members participated in the festival as audience, and that some people financially benefited from the event, some emphasize that the festival organization remained centralized in the hands of a few. As the interviews indicate, this centralization became even more apparent in the second edition of the festival, produced entirely online from Krioca's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro.

FestAlter 2020: conflict during the Covid-19 pandemic

After the first edition of the festival in October 2019 there was a ‘vacuum’ in communication between Krioca and the community of Alter do Chão, as journalist and activist Maria Eulália Borari, who acted as a presenter in both editions of the festival, recalls: ‘In the long term it didn't bring anything.… It brought in the short term … with people visiting Alter do Chão.… But right after [the festival] it was over.’ Residents of the village only heard again about the festival one year later, when they came to know, via social media and news reports, that a second, virtual edition of the festival was planned to happen in December 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, FestAlter 2020 took place entirely online via the platform FestAlter Play, a streaming platform created by Krioca where 244 films and 27 seminars were made freely available.

The set-up of FestAlter Play was not the main concern of the respondents of this study – in fact, most of them deliberately did not visit the online festival or did not manage to due to internet connection issues. What most interviewees chiefly criticized, though, was the way it was communicated to the community. Contrary to the 2019 edition, when public meetings were arranged, this time all communication and promotion of the event was done via social media, which does not widely reach a public – the residents of Alter do Chão – who mainly use TV and radio to stay informed. This resulted in many of them simply not knowing about the festival. To Laysa Mathias, who coordinated the local production of both editions, despite the reduced production team of FestAlter 2020, organizers did their best to encourage community participation with meetings via Zoom and WhatsApp and other activities, for example, inviting residents to submit their work to the festival's soundtrack competition. However, she acknowledges that ‘that larger participation that we had envisioned for this year … we couldn't achieve’, mostly due to a reluctance of villagers to participate via online channels, in her view.

The Covid-19 pandemic further aggravated the festival's distancing from the community. Difficulties in internet access in the region, with some residents not owning a computer, prevented a more substantial online attendance to FestAlter 2020. Moreover, the physical distance between Alter do Chão and the company Krioca, in Rio de Janeiro, became unworkable, further complicating the relationship between producers and community. The absence of organized institutions in Alter do Chão exacerbated the centralization of power in the hands of Krioca, since there was no united front in the village to articulate the community's wishes – the local collective Instituto Território das Artes (ITA), created after the first edition of FestAlter precisely to voice the interests of the community with regards to cultural projects, was somewhat demobilized due to the pandemic.

The interviews make clear that FestAlter 2020 deepened a detachment from the village already felt in the 2019 edition of the festival. If, at that time, some local mobilization occurred with residents attending the festival days, in the online edition not even this remained. This is a result of core organizers from Krioca not entirely taking into consideration the context of Alter do Chão when organizing FestAlter 2020. Every step of the process – from informing the community, to promoting the festival in the media, to executing the festival online – did not adopt an approach suitable to the reality of the village. This contradicts the festival's mission of understanding and cooperating with the local community, which is why claims of appropriation began to surface: many members of the Alter do Chão community were left with the impression that the production of the event was entirely centralized in Rio de Janeiro, despite the festival still carrying the name ‘Alter do Chão’ in its title.

The open letter against Krioca marks a conflict among the various stakeholders involved in the production of the event – the culmination of tensions that had been escalating since FestAlter 2019. The letter highlights the importance of retaining FestAlter's original collective ethos, considering the public funding allocated to the event and the importance of local collaborators in the production of its first edition. Ultimately, it is argued that it is unacceptable that FestAlter becomes the property of a private company. Instead, it should be treated as a collective good, to be managed by the cultural sector of Alter do Chão and neighbouring areas.

When discussing the impasse that resulted in the open letter, some respondents (some of them signatories of the letter) analysed the situation as a clash between social versus commercial goals. While the community expected FestAlter to be conducted with an open and inclusive management style, private interests from the company Krioca seem to have gotten in the way and disrupted an otherwise communitarian project. Professor Raimunda Monteiro once more compares this to a colonialist relationship, which ‘extracts what the place has [to offer] and somehow generates wealth’, comparing FestAlter to a mechanism through which Brazilian elites exert a form of ‘internal colonialism’ (Castro, 2005: 4).

This perspective, however, is not unanimous among the respondents. Notably, participants who supported FestAlter 2020 express a more cautious position, with some arguing that the accusations of appropriation do not reflect the intentions of the organization. Secretary of Culture Luis Alberto Figueira even dismisses the dispute as a political one, suggesting that some of the people who signed the open letter want to use the festival to enhance their political capital in the region – echoing Crespi-Vallbona and Richards’ (2007) argument that the symbolic capital of festivals can be co-opted by their various stakeholders to fulfil their own agendas.

Conflicts aside, the festival is still considered an important project that should continue. Some interviewees are more pessimistic and doubtful about the future of the event – pedagogue Rita Peloso, for example, thinks FestAlter might become yet another project that ‘falls from the sky’ and does not involve the community, like so many others in Alter do Chão. Others believe that dialogue and negotiation between community leaders and organizers can bring about a solution of the current tension. In any case, what most respondents emphasize is the need for the community of Alter do Chão to take back the reins of the festival, as the set designer of FestAlter 2019, Nilson Coelho, pleads: ‘We won't stop fighting. Because [the festival] already belongs to Alter [do Chão].’ Or, as Professor Monteiro summarizes, ‘The festival is ours.’

Conclusion: rupture in FestAlter

A lot has happened since the interviews for this study were conducted. While the open letter did not prevent Krioca from continuing business as usual, with a second online edition and a third hybrid edition of FestAlter having happened in December 2021 and November 2022, respectively, sectors of Alter do Chão started to come together and propose alternatives. The ITA was restructured and gained a footing in Alter do Chão's cultural scene. Besides organizing online seminars about audio-visual production in 2020 and 2021, the members of ITA decided ultimately to take the matter into their own hands and create an entirely new film festival: the Alter do Chão Latin American Film Festival (CineAlter).

Co-produced by ITA, the Santarém Theatre Association (ATAS) and the Research Support and Development Foundation (Fadesp), CineAlter promises to restore the ideals of ‘collective and integrated management, strongly connected with the community of Alter do Chão’, as stated on ITA's Facebook page (ITA – Instituto Território das Artes, 2021). This new film festival, which had its second edition in November 2022, represents a practical response to the impasse involving the organization of FestAlter: dissatisfied with its management, some of the people initially involved in the festival created an independent event – one that seeks to restore the principles of community participation and empowerment, seemingly lost in FestAlter.

Considering these latest developments, it is possible to identify four phases of power dynamics in the organization of FestAlter: union, tension, conflict and rupture. The festival was originally created by various stakeholders who agreed to collaborate in the construction of a collective event. However, tensions arose already in the planning phase, with core organizers facing challenges to engage the local community of Alter do Chão and other partners not acknowledging their efforts, feeling instead increasingly excluded from decision-making. This, according to many respondents, resulted in FestAlter 2019 only fostering community participation in a limited way, which fell short of its original plans. Tensions that started brewing with the perception of a top-down approach in FestAlter 2019 culminated in the lack of communication in the run-up to FestAlter 2020. At that point, producers from Krioca seemed to have definitively distanced themselves from local stakeholders, both figuratively and physically, which generated animosities between core organizers, (former) local partners and the Alter do Chão community at large. Ultimately, a rupture occurred when former partners of FestAlter decided to create an entirely new film festival.

This chronological analysis of FestAlter illustrates how divergent managerial visions, intentions and interests – here, regarding different conceptions of community participation – might cause clashes and even schisms between initial partners and between festival organizers and community, adding to previous studies on power dynamics in festivals (Clarke and Jepson, 2011; Loist, 2011; Lucas, 2014; Rastegar, 2009; Stadler, 2013). This case also addresses the pitfalls of community participation and empowerment. In FestAlter, while core organizers reportedly struggled to cater to the community's various interests, other collaborators considered these efforts insufficient, and the perceived mismatch between discourse and practice gave rise to claims of appropriation. In the view of many interviewees, empowerment became an empty promise: a progressive rhetoric co-opted by the festival organizers which never fully materialized (Jordan, 2021; Laing and Mair, 2015).

Most importantly, though, this case study illustrates how, in the development of cultural initiatives such as a film festival, context matters. In contested territories that still grapple with the consequences of colonization like the Brazilian Amazon (Castro, 2005; Hecht and Cockburn, 2010; Heck et al., 2005), issues of community participation are not taken lightly. Given that Alter do Chão is often targeted for social and cultural projects and organized around various activist collectives, some of its community members had the awareness and agency to resist what they considered to be exploitative practices carried out by the core organizers of FestAlter. The open letter and the new film festival thus attest to the pressure that communities can exert over festival organizers (Stadler, 2013), changing imbalanced and unfavourable power dynamics through community organization and activism.

In the perception of the participants of this study, FestAlter ultimately became one more example of film-related initiatives that do not leave concrete legacies to communities in Brazil (Póvoa et al., 2019, 2021). This resulted not only from the changing power dynamics in the organization of this film festival, but also, and most crucially, from festival organizers not taking contextual characteristics of Alter do Chão into account. Being more sensitive to this community's history, culture and socioeconomic circumstances potentially could have avoided some of the tensions that occurred in the organization of FestAlter and created a more productive relationship among its stakeholders. The case of FestAlter thus demonstrates to policymakers, cultural managers and festival organizers the challenges of upholding promises of community participation and empowerment, in particular in contested territories like Alter do Chão, and reinforces the need to really listen and meaningfully cater to the wishes of community members – only then might projects such as FestAlter become truly theirs.