The name Ben-Hur evokes a certain cinematic mythology: chariots thundering through Roman arenas, vengeance forged into redemption, and Charlton Heston’s commanding presence framed in glorious Technicolour. William Wyler’s 1959 epic, Ben-Hur, was cinema at its grandest: a Biblical-era spectacle that defined a generation of Hollywood storytelling, winning a record eleven Academy Awards and cementing its place in film history as a monument to ambition, scale, and Western heroism.

But today, a different Ben Hur is reshaping what cinema can mean — not in the coliseums of ancient Rome, but in the dusty alleyways and vivid realities of Morro das Pedras, one of Belo Horizonte’s (Brazil) largest favelas. At just 23 years old, Ben Hur Nogueira is part of a new wave of Black and peripheral Brazilian filmmakers who are not merely making films; they are reclaiming the screen itself.

Twenty-five years ago, I sat across from a man named José Zagatti, a cardboard picker in Taboão da Serra, São Paulo (Brazil). He had built a makeshift theatre — Mini Cine Tupi — inside his garage, projecting salvaged classics for neighbourhood children who had never set foot inside a cinema. His walls vibrated with sound and solidarity. His message was radical in its simplicity: cinema should belong to everyone.

Ben Hur Nogueira carries that same spirit, but with a lens sharpened by digital tools, global connectivity, and the urgency of his generation. His cinema doesn’t offer the favela as a backdrop; it emerges from it, pulsing with the rhythms, contradictions, and resistances of lived experience. His protagonists are not rescued by outsiders — they narrate themselves.

Raised by activist parents and first introduced to cinema through a book about the Oscars, Ben Hur’s first film was made with a secondhand camera his mother bought from a neighbour. His work since then has grown into a bold, resonant trilogy and the creation of a festival dedicated to Black and peripheral cinema — a space that refuses both exoticism and pity.

While Wyler’s Ben-Hur was a mythic tale about faith and imperial oppression, Nogueira’s cinema wrestles with more intimate empires: state violence, structural erasure, and the quiet dignity of Black families navigating daily survival. Yet, both stories — one Roman, one Brazilian — echo a shared impulse: to resist disappearance.

In a conversation with Meer, Ben Hur speaks with poetic clarity about memory as resistance, silence as a form of authorship, and the fraught ethics of representing marginalized communities. “Silence,” he says, “is not emptiness. It's often what’s left when everything else has been taken. In cinema, I try to return voice without invading it.”

You started with a second-hand semi-amateur camera that your mother bought from a neighbour, and with help from friends who financed your college computer. What does this origin reveal about your path in cinema?

I am deeply influenced by culture, particularly by the hip-hop movement in my work, especially a specific branch known as the “punchline.”

Punchlines are assertive messages in rap that hit the listener with impact. My films are truly punchlines—my cinema is a punchline. I believe that the eternal moment when a camera was placed in my hands allowed me to narrate my reality in a more colloquial way, just like hip-hop.

I strive to maintain a level of technical erudition and draw inspiration from influential filmmakers, but the language I seek comes as much from that first-camera experience as from my literary encounters with authors like Jorge Amado, Mário de Andrade, and Guimarães Rosa. It’s about blending erudition with colloquialism in my work.

This origin shows me that my starting point—especially with a semi-amateur camera—is where my cinema is truly formed: a genre of its own, where scholarly technique and the peripheral gaze meet, converse, and amplify one another.

Memory plays a strong role in your work, not as nostalgia, but as a political tool. Which memories, personal or collective, shape your cinematic vision the most?

I believe ancestry shapes my people’s memory. Nothing begins with me—my story is a perpetual diaspora.

I remember being 8 or 9 years old in 2010, and my father received a framed photo from his mother at a family gathering of a football team from the 1980s. He spent the whole party with a red pen, trying to guess and remember who the players were—players whose uniforms my grandmother used to wash every Sunday.

I have “glimpses” of memories from the outskirts of Belo Horizonte in the 1970s. The Padre Lopes quarry, the favela where my mother grew up in the ‘80s, the rural exodus, extreme poverty, and both police and domestic violence.

These memories come flooding back through old photographs my parents kept.

One memory I’ll never forget is the first library I ever visited regularly—a room riddled with bullet holes, near the IAPI housing complex in Belo Horizonte’s North Zone.

Across the street, there was a huge mural of Jesus stopping a man from injecting heroin into his vein. Crack had already taken many lives, AIDS was on the rise, and families lived in high-risk areas, often losing everything in arson attacks or floods. I witnessed families buried alive.

But not everything is sadness—I remember my grandma Fátima, the celebrations at my grandma Lada’s terreiro, the time my father screened The Ten Commandments in our garage at the squat we lived in. We were 7 or 8 years old, eating biscuits and drinking tea. From those memories came the seed that would grow into Arrabalde Corsário (Summertime for Bacchus).

The favela is still often treated as a backdrop or dramatic shortcut in Brazilian cinema. How do you confront that gaze, and how do your films attempt to subvert that framing?

The favela has long existed in the collective imagination of Brazilian society, but it is often portrayed from a superficial perspective, especially by elites who strip the periphery of its humanity.

Today’s peripheral cinema has powerful filmmakers, a true vanguard aiming to overturn that outdated imagination.

It’s not that violence doesn’t exist in favelas, but that they maximize it to further marginalize us.

My cinema is rooted in the urgent need to humanize the favela — to challenge the usual narratives, to shift the lens of criticism, and to empower my people. I don’t just want to tell stories; I want to be an active voice for change. I often see in films made by filmmakers with a more elitist modus operandi a more sentimental take on memory, but memory is rarely explored in the favelas. Photographs, found footage, etc.—we rarely see those details.

My main reference here is Basquiat and perhaps a bit of Paulo Lins (City of God). I want to shatter the stereotype of the Black man from the periphery that we see on television. I want to narrate our daily lives in the most human way possible. I want the favela to know we are the protagonists of our own stories.

What, for you, is the ethical responsibility of someone filming the favela, especially when so many outside gazes still exploit its pain as aesthetics?

I really know what goes on in the mind of a young Black boy from the favela in Brazil…

I know the look — the woman clutching her purse, of the racist trying to intimidate me on the street, waiting for me to slip up so he can feel superior.

I know what it’s like to be forced into the service elevator and the back doors of South Zone buildings. I know their gaze.

I know what it’s like to face hazing, tasteless racist jokes, and to have my dreams and self-worth constantly undermined. But I know my potential. Being here means realising they couldn’t survive half of what we go through every day.

I’m inspired by Muhammad Ali, who said that before the media called him great, he already believed he was destined for greatness.

I want more than awards, fame, or ambition. My goal is to make history—and put my favela and my city on the map. When I’m gone, I want them to remember that I came from there.

I have a deep responsibility to my favela, especially to the city of Belo Horizonte. When I think of BH (Belo Horizonte), I don’t think of racist elites or the buildings whose back doors I entered—I think of Clube da Esquina, Clara Nunes, Gonzaguinha, Marku Ribas, DV Tribo, and Djonga. I want to be part of that lineage. Making history is not just about me—I bring my people with me. Because beyond recognition, my loyalty will always be to my people.

Silence has a special weight in your films. How do you use it as a narrative tool—and how does it counter the constant noise often associated with the periphery?

For me, cinema holds something that distinguishes it from all other arts: visual narrative.

I remember being 18 years old, watching every day in my shack in Morro das Pedras a film that had won awards at Cannes, Venice, etc. I watched Lenin in Poland, a Soviet film from 1966. I didn’t understand a single word of the dialogue, but I understood everything through the visuals.

That’s the power of cinema: you don’t hear it—you see it.

The people who made history in cinema didn’t rely on dialogue; they relied on visuality. Silence, for me, speaks to that—an aesthetic of narrative universality, a diasporic effect I believe in and defend.

I believe sound design should capture noises that make the film more subjective and more human. Ultimately, it’s the audience who will judge everything, so in my films, favelas are given a soundscape that humanizes them.

Your first experience with cinema came from a book about the Oscars. What did that book awaken in you as a child, and what of that dream remains alive today?

There’s a line in Tupac’s song “Keep Ya Head Up” that sums this up: “Suddenly the ghetto didn’t seem so tough.”

That book was an escape valve from the harsh reality around me. If it weren’t for that book, I wouldn’t be here today. That’s why they closed so many doors in my face, they knew that if I rose up, I’d drop punchlines of knowledge.

That’s why they denied me access to culture, because they feared my potential.

That book showed me that culture always defeats the oppressor—something I also read in Paulo Freire’s work. What remains alive in that boy is the desire to make history, to be remembered. Like Djonga says: “That faith that doesn’t move mountains but moves crowds and empties police vans. Always have faith.”

Your parents were always politically active. How did that environment shape your worldview? At what point did you realise that storytelling could also be a form of politics?

In a place where many dreams are stolen, my parents dared to break those barriers. Their activism was inspired by the Black Panthers and their hunger-eradication programs.

My mother, Jutahy, always said, “A child who isn’t hungry doesn’t put a gun to anyone’s head.” I’ve suffered—and still suffer—from stigma. Some see me as a radical, an activist, a “woke” figure. To them, our pain is always “whining”. They never see me as someone with authenticity.

When I chose this path, I sensed there would be a lot of resentment. Because I know many feel I took a space they held for years by just being obvious.

When I fell, they denied me help, but I was surrounded by good people who trained me for success. They gave me books, clothes, and a worldview—empowerment. That’s when I realized my path had already been predestined.

I remember Olavo Romano, ex-president of the Minas Gerais Literary Academy, encouraging me to read Manuelzão e Miguilim by Guimarães Rosa.

It inspired me to have a bold, territorial narrative. The difference is: what Rosa did with the Sertão, I do with the favela.

Angela Davis says, “When a Black woman rises, society rises with her.”

I believe many would prefer someone like me to be stuck in menial jobs, uneducated, and far from university excellence.

I chose the opposite path: I chose to dream, to prove my worth, and to redeem every humiliation my family and I endured through culture. Because culture is the only way to defeat repression.

You often cite Reichenbach, Glauber Rocha, and Ousmane Sembène as references. What did you learn from them, and what did you choose to leave behind, knowing even masters make mistakes?

Glauber Rocha had bold editing and elevated the Third World—that’s something I constantly explore.

Ousmane was anti-colonial and depicted the enduring impact of the Casa-Grande. I try to do that subtly. But Reichenbach moved me most—he was the most scholarly and the most human.

Arrabalde Corsário is a love letter to Alma Corsária and Anjos do Arrabalde, especially Alma Corsária.

There’s a sequence with Clair de Lune that I echoed in the final scene of Arrabalde Corsário—a tribute to my favourite moment in Brazilian cinema. That’s revolutionary.

As for personal mistakes, getting here meant falling and getting back up many times. What sets me apart from many filmmakers I admire is that I came from an environment where violence was normalised.

I remember at age 11 washing blood off the sidewalk in front of my mother’s shop. Sadly, I grew up in a reality that made me question my own humanity at times.

There’s a line in Malcolm X that I hold close: “David killed his best friend to marry his wife. Solomon had over a thousand women. But no one remembers that—because the deeds of great men overshadow their human flaws.”

I believe Rocha, Ousmane, Reichenbach, Osu, Kurosawa, and Malick also made lesser-known films, but it’s their historic ones that pushed me toward cinema.

Your trilogy is intimate but not individualistic. How do you balance the personal and the collective? Is there a limit—something you refuse to turn into an image?

Pandeminas is a more aggressive film than usual—it’s the gaze of an 18-year-old boy watching his favela collapse, and the only way he can show his strength to the world is through an amateur camera.

Arrabalde is more sentimental. I try to avoid corny sentimentality and keep longing as the central focus, with photographs playing a decisive role. Originally, Arrabalde was going to end with the word Evoé, as a tribute to the final sequence of Alma Corsária by Reichenbach. But when I directed that fireworks party scene, I understood it wasn’t necessary anymore—Evoé is a chant of worship to the god Bacchus, the god of celebration, and in my view, that ending is already a hymn of celebration to Dionysus or Bacchus, a celebration of life, a brave new world.

Andança (Path) is a more naturalistic film, a short that seeks to portray the dream of a young football player and his mother encouraging him to succeed. It’s the first film where neither I nor my parents appear—it’s a film about family, but also about the challenges of dreaming while growing up in the ghetto.

I pay homage to various artists: Carlos Gomes (O Guarani) and Francisco Alves (Serra da Boa Esperança). I used the word Overture in the title as a tribute to films like Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur. There are references to Kurosawa and Ozu, to the films Garrincha: Joy of the People and Tostão, and to the novel Macunaíma through Matheus’s relationship with his two older brothers, just like Macunaíma. I paid tribute to Clube da Esquina, especially through the production design, which presents the favelas of Minas Gerais as extremely poetic spaces.

My next scripts aim to be more mature. I’m thinking about directing a musical documentary inspired by Mondo Cane (1962) and Fantasia (1940). I’m also working on how to pay tribute to Brazilian literature and bring more stories from my own reality. Everything I say, tell, and retell, I didn’t watch, I didn’t hear, I didn’t imagine, I saw it, I was there. Maybe that’s why many people feel authenticity in my work.

Creating spaces like MCPP (Mostra de Cinema Preto Periférico de Ouro Preto - Minas Gerais - Brazil) and the Marku Ribas Prize is also a way of building community. What role does this collective construction play in your creative life?

Both MCPP and the Marku Prize gave me the chance to experience something that had always been denied to me. MCPP happened when I decided to start dreaming about cinema again, during a time when I suffered a lot at university, so much injustice and cowardice that I witnessed, but I survived. I made many mistakes, too, but my mistakes made me a better person. They helped me grow and become a stronger human being. After all, all of my heroes had their moments of glory and collapse, but they made history.

When MCPP came into my life, I met people who believed in my dreams and became deeply formative figures for me: Roldo Aguiar, Lauroca, Uriel, Toninho, Gabriela, Renan, Lane, Rômulo, the Ribas family (Ju, Fatão, and Lira), and many people from Belo Horizonte and Ouro Preto who saw potential in my projects. MCPP showed me the power of peripheral protagonism and how art is collective—it unites humans, you know? In the most human way possible. It’s a deep magic, as C.S. Lewis would say.

When I discovered Marku’s work in Baptism of Blood by Helvécio Ratton (who was honoured along with Carlos Francisco at MCPP 2023), I realised he was the person I needed to turn MCPP into a mecca for Brazilian cinema. Marku worked with Grande Otelo, Bresson, and Ratton; he was exactly what I was looking for. He became one of my greatest idols, like Milton Nascimento, Grande Otelo, Itamar Assumpção, Cartola, Naná Vasconcellos, and Luiz Melodia. He became a saint, an orixá who guided me through my formative process.

That’s when I saw the power of ancestry and representation. If you allow it, both can guide you—it’s something so powerful that not even a medium can explain. It’s simply magical, you know?

There’s a quote from Djonga, who, like me, studied at UFOP (Federal University of Ouro Preto). In the song Santa Ceia, he says:

In a hurry, the good ones surrounded me. I was sweating; the good ones dried me. Creed, I returned to the ring, and the good ones were proud! But like Jesus, I returned from refuge, and even the wicked exalted me!

I’m only a reference today because references believed in my projects when no one else did.

When you watch films about the favela made by directors who avoid sensationalism and exoticism and treat these territories truthfully, what do you feel? Identification? Hope? A desire for cinematic dialogue?

Peripheral settings that escape sensationalism are rare. People like me are always labeled as exotic, as anomalies. Films like Rio 40 Graus, Rio Zona Norte, and Assalto ao Trem Pagador bring humanity and show how environmental racism and gentrification create a kind of human apartheid, segregating favelas and imposing a lack of structure, education, and healthcare.

When I watch films like that, I understand my place. It’s like when I saw Star Trek (1966) for the first time and saw Lieutenant Uhura. She wasn’t the stereotyped Black woman the media usually portrays—she was a powerful figure on the Enterprise. For me, that was the greatest anti-racist statement I’d ever seen. A person of my color in a position of importance, without stereotypes or stigma. That’s what I seek—an eradication of the stigmas that label people like me. All of that fills me with hope.

How do you imagine the future of Black and peripheral cinema in Brazil? Are we facing real change, or just another cycle the market will soon discard?

The future will be Black like the quilombos. My brothers and I are going to reclaim the throne that was stolen. I’ll be the Count of Monte Cristo of my generation. As Sabotage says in Cantando pro Santo, “A descendant of Palmares, you know.” We’ll be kings, barons, and queens. I’ll be like Robin Hood—I’ll take back what was stolen from my people and give it to my community. I’ll be like Lampião, like Marighella. I’ll do it all over again, as many times as necessary.

I made a promise to my favela when I left for university: one day, I’d return to make us the heroes of our own stories.

I believe the new wave of Black, peripheral Brazilian cinema will do just that: make history. Change comes slowly, then all at once — like a punchline, sharp and sudden, just like my films. Our revolution isn’t coming; it’s already underway. We will be remembered — not as a footnote, but as the turning point.

Despite the market’s obstacles, the democratisation of peripheral cinema exists because of those who came before me — filmmakers who broke through closed doors and carved out space where none was given. They’re the reason my generation can move forward. That’s what fuels me every day. It’s no longer a dream. It’s happening.

What needs to change, structurally, in national and international cinema so that stories from the favelas are no longer seen as exceptions but as part of the core discourse?

We need to give voice to those who are active voices—and allow the new to coexist with the obsolete. The favela is already part of Brazil’s cinematic imagination, but we need more incentive laws, more opportunities, and more media representation—not in a forced way, but in a more naturalised, normalised way. I think that’s how we’ll reap good results.

And if today you could meet that 12-year-old boy who used to read, enchanted, about the Oscars—what would you say to him?

I would look at him and say, “Hold on tight—you’re going to make history.”

This year, Ben Hur Nogueira spoke at Binghamton University in New York, where he broke down the urgency of Black Brazilian and Latin American cinema. In the first half of 2025, he also gave talks to students at Long Island University and the University of Chicago, where his films were featured and celebrated.

His debut short, Pandeminas, earned international recognition, including an honourable mention at the Varsity Film Expo in Zimbabwe.

From Morro das Pedras to the global stage, Ben Hur isn’t just making films; he’s making history. With a sharp eye, a distinct voice, and a fearless commitment to truth, Ben Hur Nogueira is a filmmaker to watch, support, and invest in.

He’s only just getting started.

Notes

Ben Hur S.