Health education movies are witnesses to history, pieces of social memory and valuable sources for producing knowledge in different fields. They still await rescue and promotion as a research subject. Within the scope of Brazil-USA cooperation that originated the Special Public Health Service (SESP) in 1942, the Rockefeller Foundation brought to Brazil its previous experience in producing and using these movies for health education actions. The present project had the aim of recovering a set of 16 mm films from the SESP collection that, over decades, had become buried, rotting away and lost in dark corners of the national bureaucracy. The objectives were to physically restore the films and to describe and thematically organize them, in order to put them into an institutional digital memory repository, with a view to subsequently making them available and socializing them, among researchers and society in general, through a virtual space on the internet.
Health education; Instruction; Health memory; SESP; Rockefeller Foundation