Lilian Solá Santiago

Lilian Solá Santiago is a documentarian, researcher, and professor (at the University of São Paulo). She is currently a doctoral student in Audiovisual Media and Processes at the University of São Paulo (ECA - USP), where she has participated in the research group CNPQ Labartemídia - Laboratory of Art, Media, and Digital Technologies since 2017. Her research in expanded cinema and shared production of knowledge originated with the “Casa da Memória Negra de Salto,” installed since 2016 at the Museum of the City of Salto Ettore Liberalesso, the subject of her PhD project in progress.

She was part of the production and research of several fiction films and documentaries in the 1990s and 2000s. With “Família Alcântara” (2006, with Daniel Santiago), she was the first Black woman in Brazil to launch a film on the commercial circuit with resources derived from fundraising and through incentive laws. In this authorial work, the images of under-represented populations stand out, mainly of the Black population, for which she received several awards in Brazil and abroad.

She has been curator of festivals and reviewer of PROAC SP in film since 2018. As a film teacher, she teaches audiovisual projects and documentary script workshops in important institutions throughout Brazil. Since 2010 she has lived in Salto, where she is a mother and coordinates the CEUNSP Film Course. She is also the creator of the “Curta Salto – Salto Film Festival,” in its seventh edition in 2021, and of the Sarau “Café com Pretos”.

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ABOUT Quase da Família (She is Almost Family)

She Is Almost Family is a documentary on the lives and cultural expectations of Brazilian housekeepers, who are mostly Black women. Woven together with stories of the life of Laudelina de Campos Melo, founder of the first housekeepers’ union in Brazil, the film includes historical reenactments performed by activists from the very union that Ms. Melo founded.