On The Fringes of Sao Paulo: Squatting is an 84-minute documentary on the homeless and the squatting movements of Sao Paulo. Captured in digital video and finalized in 35mm, the film received a research budget from the Sundance Film Festival Documentary Fund in 2002.

It is the second part of a quadrilogy begun with On the Fringes of Sao Paulo: The Homeless, also a documentary on the homeless people of São Paulo, which won twenty awards in Brazil and abroad, amongst which Best Documentary at the Gramado Film Festival and at the Rio Festival. The third installment of the series will be On the Fringes of São Paulo: Garbage and will portray the life of the people who work picking paper and other recyclable materials on the capital streets. The last part of the quadrilogy will be called “À Margem do Consumo” and will focus on the consumer-driven, savage capitalism that operates in Brazil seen by the eyes of the inhabitants of the slums of Sao Paulo.

Nowadays there are many buildings in the central region of the city which are occupied. On the Fringes of Sao Paulo: Squatting shows how the Habitation Movements Union (UMM) acts in Sao Paulo, an organization that congregates various groups involved in the fight for habitation, urbanization of the slums, and the renovation of slum tenant-houses and empty buildings. They are: Slum Tenant-houses Forum, Unification of the Tenant-houses Fight (ULC), Center Habitation Movement (MMC) and the Center Homeless Movement (MSTC). We interviewed the main leaders of these movements.

On the Fringes of Sao Paulo: Squatting follows the daily routine of the occupations, the alternation on the cleaning shores, the administrative difficulties, the collective payment of water and electricity bills at the end of the month, the close neighbor relationships which allow very little privacy. Also, the insecurity and the angst of those who are aware that they are living illegally and technically, homelessly.

The documentary had as an academic consultant architect Valeria Cusinato, author of the essay “Empty constructed spaces in the central region of Sao Paulo and urban dynamics”, developed with the Civil and Urban Construction Engineering Department of the Politechnical School at USP and financed by the CNPQ.

On the Fringes of Sao Paulo: Squatting portrays the relationship between the movements, their leaders, the population as well as the rules that exist for people to be accepted into the occupations, such as forsaking alcohol and drugs, frequency and participation in assemblies and collective activities. How does orientation – political and otherwise – work at these organized occupations?

We tried to focus on the conflict between the social value of habitation and its commercial value for real estate speculation, especially in downtown Sao Paulo, which, according to geographer Milton Santos, is a region that lives in a kind of urban space schizophrenia. Street vendors fighting with regular store owners, street dwellers, banks, offices, paper pickers, public power and the historical and cultural estate - all the agents of the urban space are acting simultaniously and every habitation program with a social interest ends up confronting with all these conflicts.

A documentary about the homeless and housing movement in São Paulo. The film follows the Word of Several leaders who promote acts of occupation in the central region of São Paulo and who are doing social justice into their own hands, winning the long awaited housing for a miserable population that does not support to live in hostels and slums. On the Fringes of São Paulo: Squatting is the second documentary of a tretalogia about São Paulo started with À Margem da Imagem, about homeless people.