Carrapateira is No Longer Jealous of Apollo 11

In 1969, the Jornal do Brasil sent a reporter to the town of Carrapateira to see how the population of what was then the country’s poorest municipality, would react to the arrival of the man on the moon. Thirty-four years later, this journey was repeated in order to shoot this documentary. At that time, NASA’s budget for the enterprise was equivalent to the Carrapateira town hall budget over a period of 33,330 years. Down-to-earth conquests reached the region at a snail’s pace. Electricity was installed that same year, in 1969, cobblestones were laid in 1977, and piped water arrived in 1993. To this day, Carrapateira has no sewage system or bank. Teacher Leonília Pereira has used the conquest of the moon as a topic in class every year since 1969. And so, the children of today were asked to write and read an exercise about this subject. This documentary uses romance and humor to show the conquest of space as a counterpoint to the dreams of progress and development of a small town at the end of the earth.