Unrecorded (working title) is a research-based audiovisual project examining Fecho do Funil, a site near Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, where the construction of an early-20th-century railway passage is linked to repeated worker deaths. Minas Gerais counts 853 municipalities, many named after the railway engineers who worked in the region, but none after the workers who built the tracks. The project traces how this stretch of railway, built shortly after the abolition of slavery, relied largely on the labour of formerly enslaved people and their descendants, and examines how structures of racialised labour persisted through the region's modernisation.
The site lies within the same landscape as the 2019 tailings dam collapse in Brumadinho, which killed over 270 people, most of them workers. The project connects the history of the railway to this disaster through archival research, site-based investigation, and community engagement. It also explores the current environmental and labour risks associated with mining in the region as well as the oral histories that are connected to these events and are at risk of disappearing.
Luís Knihs is a filmmaker and producer living and working between São Paulo and Berlin.
