Dr Angela Torresan, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, has been working with mother-activists in Brazil whose children were killed by police violence. Through collaborative filmmaking workshops using smartphone cameras, Dr Torresan is training women to document their lives, their grief, and their fight for justice.

In a recent project supported by the United Nations Democracy Fund, and in partnership with the Mothers of May Movement, the Federal University of São Paulo, and the non-governmental organisation Conectas, Dr Torresan trained 12 women across four regions of Brazil in audiovisual storytelling. The resulting short films have been shared on the social media platforms of mother-led movements and screened locally to raise awareness, honour the lives of those lost, and challenge dominant narratives that racialise and discredit the lives of women in peripheral neighbourhoods.

Following the conclusion of this project, a group of leading mother-activists in Rio de Janeiro asked Dr Torresan to run a further workshop tailored to their local network.  This new initiative, supported by the University of Manchester’s Humanities Strategic Investment Fund, will take place in January 2026. It focuses on enhancing technical skills so that more women can record incidents of police violence as they occur in their daily lives, using their phones to produce footage with the visual quality needed to be accepted as legal evidence.

This new phase continues a growing movement of community-led documentation in Brazil, where mothers are using film as both a tool of resistance and a means of visibility. Through this work, they are building a record of state violence from their own perspective; producing testimony that centres their voices and lived knowledge.