Brazil’s Digital Media Ingenuity: Navigating Creativity in an Uncertain Global Landscape

It is an obvious commonplace to start a text by stating the power and impact of the culture products made in the US. As a screen producer and academic researcher growing up in Brazil, I got used to it and even accepted it as part of our “local” culture, somehow. But Brazil, like Italy or France, has always had the utmost pride in its audiovisual productions. The country’s communicational DNA is rooted in oral tradition, and it has welcomed the many broadcast innovations, from radio to the diverse formats of the ever-present open television, to the early manifestations of internet content.  Nevertheless, that passion for media paved the way for the arrival of other influences too, especially from Japan. I witnessed the mesmerizing impact created by the arrival of content from the Far East from the mid 80’s onwards. As a kid, the Tokusatsu series started airing after school on TV. Their merchandise flooded the shelves of all the stores in our country. As the decades passed, the franchises changed but met with the same success. In a similar, but not identical explosion, the last two decades made way for Korean music and films.  I never understood why European content was not positioned similarly  in my country, and that is a hard question to ask.  As our historical cultural beacon, I somehow expected that the classical art tradition could provide the impulse to introduce other modern influences. I wanted to believe that a strong, independent audiovisual and interactive media scene was about to flourish and bring a breath of fresh air to these cultural expressions. But over the years that feeling seemed increasingly far from reality: apart from some exceptional cases, I’ve searched in Finland, Czech Republic, UK and, finally, Italy, to discover that, in fact, it seems to be the other way around. While Europe continues to develop good initiatives to build a strong competitive digital “Entertainment and Media” ecosystem, experiences from unexpected places such as the Global South could refresh this context.