Brazil’s International Disability Film Festival Assim Vivemos happens every two years in Brazil since 2003. Its purpose is to engage the audience in new perspectives on disability through films, interactive activities, images and institutional discourses. In this paper the author analyzes the films whose central subject is Down syndrome, screened between 2003 and 2013 to explore the narrative construction and the kind of images and meanings that are disseminated at the festival. The empirical material was considered under an ethnographical perspective, and was analyzed using semiotic procedures of isotopic analysis. Three main narrative nuclei were identified following the theoretical developments on disability, being one of them in line with what is considered as ‘disability aesthetics’.
Film festivals; Disability; Down syndrome; Image; Culture