Maestra Productions is a collaborative production house that makes documentary films that center arts, education and social justice movements.
Debuting August 2025
In 1963, Paulo Freire led a small group of educators across Northeastern Brazil in experimental “Culture Circles,”teaching 300 rural people to read and write in forty hours. Their innovative method used critical and creative thinking instead of memorization and repetition. By contextualizing and personalizing the lessons, educators used their surroundings to teach vocabulary and construct meaning – and to vote. Freire’s project opened the door for them to get ID cards for the first time and participate in the fervor of the blossoming democracy taking place in Brazil at that time. A coup d’etat in 1964 overthrew the president, shut down the program and set fire to the farmers’ notebooks. Freire was forced into exile for 16 years, spreading this pedagogy around the globe and impacting education until today.
MAESTRA explores this story through the personal testimonies of the young women who went out to teach literacy in rural communities across the island—and found themselves deeply transformed in the process.
The unknown story of trovador Silvio Rodriguez, talking in first person about the life-defining experience he had as a 14-year-old when he taught a campesino family how to read and write during the 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign.
This documentary short is a new release created from the 16mm archives of the groundbreaking 1985 film “You Got to Move“ on the work of Highlander Center by Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Selver.
A intimate look into the SNCC and CORE Freedom Schools of the 1960s. Through intimate interviews with former Freedom School teachers and students, we see the generations deep dreams and creations of Black-led liberation education and it’s connection to broader struggles for racial justice in this country, and that many people and organizations are still fighting for.
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