From the beginning of its history, cinema maintains an intricate relation with the cities. Urban territorialities, landscapes and paths coexist in 'real' places as much as on the screen, leading us to the perspective of Geographies of Cinema, field in which this work is inscribed. It is no longer just a matter of questioning about the representations that urban spaces get on in films, but of investigating how the places imagined by filmmakers reverbarates throughout the cultural identity of places, that is, the capacity of cinema to generate territorial experiences.
For this reflection, the focus lies on the particularities of Palmas, capital of the Brazilian state of Tocantins, and on the audiovisual works that have been produced there. On the one hand, there is a new city, built ex nihilo as an index of modernity, marked by political personalism and with a narrative impregnated with officialism and deeply rooted in media. On the other hand, we find a small cinema, in peripheral condition, with few resources for production and distribution. In the confrontation between these realities, we try to understand if the local filmmakers conserve enough independence to dream of Palmas and to debate its history and identity in a way that differs from those that prevail, for instance, in the hegemonic journalism.
Although it has to resort to the urban, political and cultural context of the city, the argumentation proposed are based fundamentally on the films. Thence, we perform film analysis of eleven different works, both in terms of length and genre as well as regarding the conditions and time of production. We also resort to interviews with some filmmakers studied, which results in primary source material to assist in the analysis. These actions aim to contribute to a historiography still very scarce about local audiovisual production, in order to give it visibility and, therefore, existence in the Brazilian cinematographic cartography.
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