Gilda Brasileiro is a chemist who lived a comfortable life in Rio de Janeiro’s famous district of Ipanema. She leaves this life behind to go live in the calm small town of Salesópolis, in the countryside of Brazil’s São Paulo State. There she finds that the place she chose to take a quiet break from the megacity has its own history of unleashing terror upon her black ancestors. Soon she starts research into this violent history and in the process sheds light on a part of Brazil’s dark and gory soul. Brasileiro is the subject of directors Roberto Manhães Reis and Viola Scheuerer’s Gilda Brasileiro—Against Oblivion, a documentary film that explores the motivations and ambitions behind both official and popular narratives of Brazil’s history of slavery and racism.

Her research into the town’s past starts with a look into the history of Dória Road, an old slave traders’ road in her new home. She reminds us that while the transatlantic slave traffic to Brazil was banned in 1831, Dória Road was constructed in 1832, one year later, which made the road clandestine. It also turns out that certain people held up as heroic figures in the town’s history, were actually brutal slave masters and traffickers. They include the priest for whom the road was named as well as former army official, Captain Pereira, praised in official accounts of the town’s history. Gilda tries to prove, using old documents, that Pereira’s slaves were the ones who constructed Dória Road. This doesn’t go down well with the town’s present white residents, who claim that Pereira never held any slaves and should be admired for his efforts in developing the region during the nineteenth century.