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Until the 19th century, Brazil maintained a public institution to arrest and punish slaves, known as Dungeon. This institution no longer exists, it was destroyed and buried in Rio de Janeiro. Yet, reverberations of its practices are still very much alive and running in Brazil’s contemporary prison system. From its vestiges, the history of the Dungeon and its legacy can now be unearthed.

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Director's notes
 

Home, for me, is a corner of Rio de Janeiro known as Little Africa. During my childhood, my father used to take me on walks around the old city center, along the shores of Guanabara Bay. He would tell me about how important that region was to the history of the city, and how important we, Black Brazilians, were in building that city and its culture. Over the years, however, I came to realize that the stories my father told me were not the same ones I was taught at school.

The streets that I walked with my father are a testament to how Rio de Janeiro has literally buried much of its past. The old city center was home to the largest slaving port in the Americas, the point of arrival for as many as a million enslaved people, but that fact has been shunted into the darkness as much as possible. In recent years, excavations have revealed the mass graves of enslaved Africans in the neighborhood where I grew up – but the discoveries were only made accidentally, during construction projects meant to “modernize” the region.

Rio’s continual attempts to sell itself as the “Marvelous City” are, to a great extent, a struggle to hide its murderous past. The Calabouço, or Dungeon, is another of the secrets that the city has swept under the rug. It was a slave prison where state-sanctioned torture took place, the epitome of the cruelty of Brazil’s past. But unlike the mass graves, no physical evidence remains of the Dungeon – and almost nobody living in Rio today knows of its existence. However, the mechanisms of control and brutality honed in the Dungeon are very much alive in the nation’s prisons.

On those walks by the bay with my father, I listened to the stories that bubble up from the city’s soil, that are carried in on the ocean breeze, that we sing in our sambas and that our bodies tell as we dance. These stories are not always easy to hear. But they need to be told. And that is why Images of the Dungeon is a film that needs to exist.

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