Emprestaí Mídia is a community media infrastructure and media justice initiative in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, providing free access to professional filmmaking, photography, production, and projection equipment through an accessible multimedia equipment library. By expanding access to communications technologies that are often prohibitively expensive, the initiative advances audiovisual sovereignty—enabling under-represented communities to access the means of media production, tell their own stories, document their own realities, and represent themselves on their own terms.
Access to the library is 100% free. To maximize both the social utility of the equipment and the number of people it reaches, Emprestaí Mídia prioritizes lending equipment to media-making workshops, training programs, and capacity-building initiatives, many of which it organizes or facilitates directly. These programs combine access to professional tools with the knowledge and skills required to use them, allowing equipment to be shared among multiple participants while developing lasting local production capacity.
Outside of workshops, equipment is available through short-term loans to a growing community of independent filmmakers, media activists, media collectives, citizen journalists, Indigenous media makers, human rights defenders, and members of Brazil’s social movements. Longer-term loans to filmmakers and organizations are also considered through an application process.
Operating at the intersection of media justice, audiovisual sovereignty, Indigenous rights, human rights documentation, community journalism, participatory filmmaking, civic engagement, and the circular/sharing economy, Emprestaí Mídia has demonstrated the value of its model over the past decade without external funding. It is now seeking its first dedicated financing for a two-year pilot to institutionalize, strengthen, and scale this proven community resource.
