Film and audiovisual festivals in contemporary bahia: memory and cultural formation

This article presents observations about the conditions of possibilities for the execution, structuring and continuity of two cinematographic and audiovisual exhibition actions, from the state of Bahia, Brazil, being: the “Panorama Internacional Coisa de Cinema” [Panorama Internacional Thing of Cinema] and the “Mostra Cinema Conquista” [Conquista Cinema Festival], carried out from 2002 and 2004, in Salvador and in Vitória da Conquista, respectively. By analyzing documentary data, interviews and participation on respective actions, we start from the hypothesis that they were not only sustained by material and objective conditions, related to the period’s economical and political conjunctures, linked to the structural transformations occurred from the Brazilian Cinema recapture, but also to symbolic matters, from cultural formation processes, perceived from the comprehension of their makers’ formation trajectories, the paths they have made for the events, from local conditions and networking articulations in which they partook. It does such seeking theoretical methodological support on sociologist Norbert Elias’ The Symbol Theory and his concept of “configuration”, as well as on Pierre Bourdieu’s praxiological theory that considered interaction processes and the knowledge generated by them, observing human expressions in the modeling of practices.