The history of social housing in Portugal is complicated, as this movie shows. After the end of the dictatorship, left-wing governments started building social housing to guarantee the right to housing and erradicate shanty towns. While a positive evolution, this policy was often used by municipal authorities as a means of getting rid of "undesirables", by putting them on large quarters located in the periphery, sometimes with only a dead end street connecting it to the rest of the city. This is the story of one of the most problematic social housing quarters in Porto, the "São João de Deus".
Known as "Tarrafal", after the concentration camp where the dictatorship sent political dissidents to die, this neighbourhood was populated mostly by people considered "undesirable", namely gypsies, and families that had been kicked out of other social housing quarters for disrespecting some rule. It soon became evident that having thousands of the most poor and vulnerable people living in a neighbourhood in the periphery was a terrible idea, as the people there had almost no chance of getting a job outside of drug trafficking or other criminal activities. So the municipality addressed a mistake by making another mistake: demolishing the quarter and scattering the families across other social housing quarters.
This beautifully filmed documentary shows testimonies of those who lived in the "Tarrafal" and miss the community they lost. In doing this, it shows just how cruel it is to treat a whole community as a mafia because there are some criminal elements within it. It shows how none of the problems in the community (like poverty and illiteracy) were addressed by the demolition of the quarter and how traumatic it was for the people targeted to be thrown out of the only house they ever knew.
As someone who grew in Porto but knew nothing of "Tarrafal" this touched me. I recommend it not only to Portuguese people but to everyone concerned about social issues like poverty, exclusion and racism.