Hello,
In the last part of the “CAPOEIRA WAS NOT CREATED IN A VACUUM” PAGE, I posted a video playlist that featured a few videos from a organization called, “The Bantu Project.”
I would like to introduce to you the man who created the bantu project, Mestre Roxinho.
Edielson da Silva Miranda, known as Mestre Roxinho, was born in 1969 in Ilha de Veracruz, Bahia. He is a Master of Capoeira Angola and the first Master of Capoeira Angola from Bahia to have established a registered School of Capoeira Angola, Escola de Capoeira Angola Mato Rasteiro (ECAMAR), in Australia.
He has dedicated his life to sharing the healing art of Capoeira Angola and using it as a social cohesion tool to empower marginalized youth from indigenous and refugee backgrounds through Project Bantu. The program is now run in Australia and the Asia-Pacific area, and also in North Carolina, U.S.A..
I can type more about his work, but a picture (or a video) is worth a thousand words, so I’m posting this documentary about Mestre Roxinho and his life, along with the video description, so you can see and FEEL more about his work.
LOGLINE
African Brazilian Master Roxinho confronts his traditional views of Africa when he meets a group of young African refugees at a multicultural high school in Sydney. A conflicting master-disciple relationship filmed over six years. SYNOPSIS African Brazilian Master Roxinho comes to Australia in 2006 and starts teaching the art form of Capoeira Angola to a group of troubled young African refugees who go to Cabramatta High School. The school is uncertain of what to make of this program. Some fiercely resist it, arguing it is not helping students improve their behavior and literacy. Others defend it, arguing the program will help African refugees with no prior education to better integrate into Australia. The filmmaker becomes deeply involved with participants as he follows, in a participatory filmmaking style, the unfolding stories of migration and African diaspora that emerge from in between the walls of a multicultural school in the outskirts of Sydney, Australia.
CONTEXT: MULTICULTURALISM AND AFRICAN DIASPORA
Capoeira Angola is an art form rooted in the African culture and spirituality that emerged in Brazil during colonisation. It helped slaves strengthen physically and spiritually to deal with the shackles of oppression. Today, centuries later, Capoeira Angola crosses the oceans by the hands of Mestre Roxinho and meets a group of young African refugees who experience learning and behaviour difficulties in a public school in Australia.
Although they come from diverse cultures, Roxinho and these young African refugees close a kind of circle back to their African roots, in Australia. Curiously, the filmmaker is descendent from the race and culture of those who oppressed the African slaves in Brazil. Film production could reproduce a tension of historical dimensions. But complicity unfolds, as in the Australian context, both the filmmaker and the Capoeira Master are ethnic migrants in an English colony.
The film, both in its production process and its screen content, is situated at the intersection of a complex set of narratives of diaspora and multiculturalism that compete in terms of the perspectives and values in which they are constructed and developed. As a story of diaspora, all participants exhibit particular traces of both their routes (their journeys) and their roots (their origins) and they negotiate these through filmmaking and through the diasporic art forms of Capoeira Angola and Rap. Despite coming from very different cultural backgrounds, participants belong to the same multicultural category in Australia.
THE FILMMAKER
Paulo Alberton is a Brazilian-born (Australian Citizen) independent documentary filmmaker who used to work as an international airline pilot. Over the last 17 years his films have explored issues of racial, cultural, religious and sexual identification. Paulo has lived and worked in São Paulo, New York, Johannesburg, Perth and Sydney. He studied at NYU, in New York, did Queer Film Studies at WITS University in Johannesburg, did an MA degree at AFTRS specializing in documentary directing, and a Doctorate of Creative Arts at UWS, in Sydney. Paulo has taught film at university, certificate and community levels. His broadcast credits include the 10-minutes Going To The Dogs (SBS); the half-hours Give Me A Break (SBS) and Living On (SBS) and one hours’ Swapping Lives (SBS), Drums of Maranhão (TV Cultura – Brazil), and a long running half-hour documentary series on Brazilian instrumental music (Sesc TV – Brazil). Awards include Best Photography for Water and I; Film Australia special commendation and ATOM Best-multimedia award for Mijn Man; and Best Documentary and Best Editing at Western Australian Screen Awards 2004 for Going To The Dogs.
FESTIVALS
As of Nov 2014, the film has just been submitted to the following festivals: Berlin, Rotterdam, Hotdocs, É Tudo Verdade (São Paulo, Brazil)
CONTACT
Paulo Alberton Pauloalberton2@gmail.com
http://www.pauloalberton.com
Recently, (June 18, 2022) My teacher Charles Williams had a conversation with Mestre Roxinho through ZOOM, where he candidly talks about his new book, Ginga de Resilência: Capoeira Angola Para Além Da Roda”. (Ginga of Resilience: Capoeira Angola For Beyond The Roda)
The book centers on the use of Capoeira Angola as an instrument for positive transformation in the lives of children, youth, and their communities. This book has been a long and special journey for Mestre Roxinho and now he is ready to share it with the world.
This conversation was a part of our Juneteenth celebration and healing weekend that we had this year (2022).
Now, here are some professional resources for supporting those with mental health issues, as well as links to Mestre Roxinho’s ongoing and future projects.
https://nami.org/Home: NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness): The nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to educating, advocating, supporting, and building better lives for the millions of individuals & families affected by mental illness.
https://www.namiurbanla.org/resourcesHeadspace: Headspace is the National Youth Mental Health Foundation. Since 2006 they provide early intervention mental health services to 12-25-year-olds in over 145 communities across Australia, our online and phone counseling services, our vocational services, and our presence in schools.
https://headspace.org.au https://www.clinicaapice.com.br: Clinica Apice Located in Salvador da Bahia, specializing in mental health, with an interdisciplinary proposal and a project built from the dialogue between professionals, patients and their families.
Project Bantu is a non-profit, that effectively works with children and young people utilizing the music, movements and play of Capoeira Angola as well as other cultural activities as tools for empowerment helping young people overcome poverty, trauma, as well as other complex behaviors that are rooted in violence or brought about by social inequality. If you want to know more about Mestre Roxinho and his work, or would like to make a donation, please go to his websites:
https://chuffed.org/project/bantu-institute-fight-poverty-social-inequality
Jogo Corpo Fechado 