6th Session of the ACTIVA-TE Film Festival

The sixth session of this Film Festival, which is being held in the cement zone of the city of Maputo, its suburbs, and some higher education institutions, this time arrived in the Hulene neighbourhood. It is an initiative aimed at the community in general, with the main objective of contributing to the sensitization and awareness of activism and the right to health and bringing to consciousness the important role that communities play in the context of health and human rights.

In this session, it was projected ʽʽINTERVALOʼʼ, a film made by Nelson Mabuie and starred by Mariamo Mabuie. After the projection, there was a debate on “the main challenges in the construction of positive masculinities in Mozambiqueʼʼ, with the presence of its director, Nelson Mabuie, the social activist Adão Paia, and the moderator Karina Dulobo, head of gender in medicusmundi.

ʽʽINTERVALOʼʼ runs around Mariamo, a 5^th class student, who wakes up one morning and could not assume that her school day was completely shaken. The most restless student in the class could not get up from the chair due to her menarche.

Nelson Mabuie states that the choice of this film's title ʽʽINTERVALOʼʼ was due to the fact that this name symbolizes “the interval that everyone has between the period of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; and the dilemmas of the roles that should be assumed in each of these phases, depending on their genre”.

After that, the social activist Adão Paia, mentioned that the reflection that the film brings is very interesting, in order to question the roles that are socially attributed to each genre, where the father is often understood only as the family provider and not in full participation in the children's growth process.

For Adão Paia, the positive masculinities find limitations in the perception we have about the roles that each genre should assume. That is, about the functions and habits that a man and a woman, namely, must assume. “We often have pressure and expectations put on what we should and should not do", he said.

It should be noted that this film show is inserted in the "Activa-te" Campaign, which was launched last February by the Alliance for Health, to defend the right to health in Mozambique, in the areas of the right to health, Obstetric violence, Improvement of services to women victims of VBG, Rights and Duties of the patient, Sexual Diversities and Positive Masculinities, Nutrition and Community Health, focusing on obtaining positive effects for the strengthening of the National Health System.

This activity took place with the financial support of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and other co-financers.