The Favelas Games

Jorge is a 50 years old gardener and he lives in Rio de Janeiro. Besides taking care of gardens, Jorge is building up for the second time his house in the Favela of Vila Taboinha, in the suburb west of Rio. He’s building up alone. The first house he built was in the close Favela Vila Recreio. He spent 16 years to build it up. Then the municipality decided to destroy and remove all the neighborhood, with plenty houses, in order to create the TransOeste, a new “essential” road for the Olympic games communication. This is a well-know fact, happened before to several other people living in the Favelas of Rio. This time Jorge decided to fight against the evacuation politic who prefer economical interest of few people at expense of all the people who lives in those areas. Games and events of different type are presented in Rio as the perfect excuse to justify a brutal real estate speculation and evacuation of many areas who where marginals few yaers ago. That’s why Jorge is not only anymore a gardener. He became an activist of this struggle against a system. Together with him there’s a lot of people conditioned by that: Francisca is just an example. A dense supportive net of experts, academics, lawyers, citizens, as Mario and Rafael for example, activist in a lot of social project act to defend human rights. We find and speak with them to learn from its experiences what a Favela is and how it stand into the city.