Documentary “Luci e a Terra” premieres on April 12 in Florianópolis

Luci Choinacki is a landless woman from the countryside, an agroecology and women's rights activist. The first farmer in Brazil to be a state and federal deputy, after 20 years with outstanding performance in Parliament, she returns to farming and cultivates a dream. The affirmative story of this Brazilian woman is told in 18 minutes, in the documentary scripted and directed by Kátia Klock.

While walking among the vegetable beds, Luci Choinacki explains the importance of treating the land well so that nature can do its part and produce food. She understood, throughout her life, that care reflects a lot on the final result - and so, she proudly displays the healthy organic lettuce, which she has just harvested. In the documentary, which will have a preview on April 12, at 19:30 pm, at the Auditorium of the Center for Popular Education (CEDEP), in Florianópolis, Luci speaks lightly, full of wisdom and history:

“The Earth is alive and it needs everything, just like us. Who nourishes the plant is the earth. If it is very well taken care of, the plant becomes strong.”  

It is with love that she tells about her return to life in the countryside and her current moment, on a rural property in Planalto Catarinense. The first farmer elected state deputy in Santa Catarina, in a growing political career that placed her three times as a federal deputy in the National Congress, Luci remembers her childhood, when family food was scarce, her dream of being a teacher at a time when she did not have access to to books, and who was unable to study.

The documentary "Luci e a Terra" was contemplated in 2020 with the Catarinense Film Award, through the Catarinense Foundation for Culture and Government of the State of Santa Catarina. Due to the pandemic, production resumed at the end of 2021.

Harvest trajectory, speeches and labor achievements 

“Luci e a Terra” is a documentary about Luci Teresinha Choinacki and her political relationship with life, women, plants and the earth. After her terms as state and federal deputy for the Workers' Party (PT), Luci Choinacki returned to farming. In 2016, together with her partner, Helton Rubens Castro da Silva, she started an urban garden in Florianópolis, where they sold agroecological products until the beginning of 2021. The pandemic led to the change of municipality. Now, in Planalto Catarinense, they grow food on a leased site.

The production of the short film, made by Contraponto and directed by Kátia Klock, sought iconographic material about Luci Choinacki's passage through different social and political struggles. She was active in the 1980s with Pastoral da Terra, in western Santa Catarina, participated in the beginning of the Movement of Women Farmers (today MMC), was the first woman farmer in Brazil to be elected state deputy (1987-90), and then federal deputy for three terms between 1991 and 2015. Author of the law that instituted retirement for housewives, Luci has always been at the forefront of projects to improve women's lives, living conditions in the countryside and the environment .

“Luci e a Terra” transcends the routine of the rural worker who was a deputy, and the girl who was born into a family with the basic need to plant to have something to eat. Luci has a little of each woman who lives in rural areas. The documentary proposal is to bring the public's gaze closer to the life and work of women in the countryside, their relationship with the environment, conflicts, losses, gains, and how this profession that feeds so many lives is a political form of exist. “To reflect on the existence of a woman like Luci Choinacki is to provoke the exercise of problematization of questions about land and life, about occupation and agriculture, about health and food sovereignty, and about the role of women in this unequal territory. ”, says Kátia Klock.