Title: São Palco - Cidade Afropolitana wins award for best feature film at ANPOCS

The film São Palco - Cidade Afropolitana, directed by Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji and Jasper Chalcraft, and produced in collaboration with the Laboratory of Image and Sound in Anthropology (LISA-USP), received the Ana Maria Galano Award for best feature film during the awards ceremony of the 49th Annual Meeting of ANPOCS. The film will be available for one month on the event's website: https://www.encontro2025.anpocs.org.br/conteudo/view?ID_CONTEUDO=1719

São Palco - Cidade Afropolitana is the fourth film resulting from the anthropologists' research with African artists who arrived in Brazil in the last decade. In the research, conducted in conjunction with the Department of Anthropology at USP, Rose and Jasper follow the protagonists in their artistic pursuits throughout the city of São Paulo. They observe the stages they occupy, the spaces they build with their music, the challenges they face in their daily lives, and the diasporic creativity they share with the Brazilian public and artists they encounter along the way. The feature film is a mosaic of the African creative diaspora in São Paulo.

What do African artists arriving in Brazil in recent years bring with them on their journey? How do the African diasporas—the new creative diaspora and the one that turned the Atlantic into a graveyard—dialogue with each other? What stages are occupied, built, filled with the performances of artists who cross the ocean? Ancestralities updated in performances that construct an Afropolitan present in a metropolis where it is necessary to be daring, to color the gray. São Palco - Cidade Afropolitana presents the city of São Paulo as a meta-stage occupied by artists from Togo, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola, among other African nations, in dialogue with the Brazilian population and its openings, contradictions, and tensions.

Jasper Chalcraft is a British anthropologist and filmmaker. Rose Satiko Hikiji is a professor at the University of São Paulo and coordinator of the Image and Sound in Anthropology Laboratory at USP. The film is the result of the research project “Being/Becoming African in Brazil: African music and cultural heritage in São Paulo,” conducted by both directors, with support from the São Paulo Research Foundation and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. Other films and productions from the research can be seen on the website afrosampas.org.