Few who survive: reports of violence, gangs and cinema in Piauí

Abstract

The paper is the result of an investigation into the dynamics of violence on the favelas of the city of Teresina, Piauí, based on the accounts of 9 residents of the city’s favelas, whose lives have been directly affected by violence and crime. The stories are part of the documentary entitled Few Who Survive (2021), made by the researchers based on research carried out by the Research Center on Children, Adolescents and Youth (NUPEC) at the Universidade Federal do Piauí between 2019 and 2021. The research brings together reports on criminal dynamics in the favela, representations of imprisonment, police violence, gang formations and ways of reinventing life. The production of the research and the documentary are part of the historical context of the escalation of violence in the state of Piauí, and make use of the rapprochement between audiovisual and social research techniques. The research techniques employed were the use of open-ended interviews in the construction of a documentary, based on non-probabilistic snowball sampling, with subsequent categorization around the central axes of the research: police violence, imprisonment, gangs and survival strategies. The main results obtained through the research are reflections on the methodological procedures relating to the use of audiovisual resources in sociological research into violence, such as the relevance of re-enacting lived experience as a resource in social research and the imaginative possibility of audiovisuals applied to research.