Utopia e destruição, ruína e progresso

The movie A Margem, by Ozualdo Candeias, reports the daily lives of four individuals dwelling in a peripheral region of Sao Paulo city. From the considerations of Marc Ferro, Eduardo Morettin and Ismail Xavier, the paper points out paths to mobilize the cinema as a source of the historical knowledge. In the investigation, main emphasis is given to the construction of the social experience of the marginalized, which is strained between the constitution of solidarity bonds and the incapacity of reacting collectively to the oppressions. Besides that, the movie is also investigated as a critical perspective about the modernization process in Sao Paulo city, intensified since the fifties.