Democracy Doc Debuts in Venice 5

Brazilian documentarian Petra Costa continues to chronicle the dire state of democracy in her homeland with the eye-opening exposé Apocalypse in the Tropics (Apocalipse nos Trópicos), delving into the troubling ties linking Christian evangelism and politics all the way up to the highest office.

As in her Oscar-nominated 2019 feature, The Edge of Democracy, Costa gets up close and personal with some very powerful people, capturing them during a wave of social and political unrest that has plagued Brazil over the past decade. This time, she focuses primarily on Silas Malafaia — a popular televangelist and key figure in the Assembleias de Deus Pentecostal church, who holds great sway over politicians on both the left and right in a country where evangelists represent over 30% of the population.

With its portrayal of fundamentalist agitators, fake news purveyors, the very Trump-like Jair Bolsonaro, and, during an explosive finale, an attack on the country’s capital waged by hordes of insurrectionists, the similarities between events depicted in Tropics and recent U.S. history are uncanny, to say the least.

But Costa goes further than simply making unspoken comparisons. She explores the history of evangelism to try and grasp how its apocalyptic visions managed to capture the hearts and minds of so many Brazilians. By doing so, she sheds light on a phenomenon present not only in Brazil and America, but in countries around the world where “faith in progress and democracy” is currently being tested like never before.

What makes Tropics so riveting is the way Costa constantly shifts between the epic and the intimate, the macro and the micro. She uses drones and other tools to film massive crowds of protestors like extras in an historical drama, then goes handheld to follow Bolsonaro, as well as re-elected leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as they contend with the religious players forcing them to embrace Christianity in public.

Dividing her movie into chapters whose titles feel apocalyptic in their own right (“The Kingmaker,” “Dominion,” “Genesis”), Costa cleverly uncovers how evangelism arrived on Brazil’s shores via the likes of Billy Graham and Henry Kissinger, who saw the increasingly left-leaning turn of the Catholic church in South America as a danger to U.S. interests. The new name of the game would be “Christ and capitalism,” with fundamentalist pastors flooding Brazil and opening new churches across the land. By the time we arrive at the 2022 election, the country counts 50 million or more evangelists, who can no longer be ignored by any candidate running for office.

In the 2018 presidential election, the outspoken Malafaia throws his weight behind Bolsonaro (whose wife is an evangelist, as evidenced by footage of her speaking in tongues), thus helping propel the far-right provocateur to victory. It’s hard to tell if Bolsonaro, who gets baptized in the Jordan River to prove his Christian bona fides, is a true believer or strategically aligning himself with one of the nation’s most potent political forces. Either way, the people are soon referring to him as a “messiah” — a reference to his actual middle name, Messias, as well as to his promises to save Brazil from the triple threats of corruption, communism and wokeism.

The crusade against the former, resulting in the false imprisonment of Lula for nearly two years, backfires big time when it turns out the Bolsonaro-appointed prosecutors of the case were the actual corrupt ones. That — along with the president’s disastrous handling of the COVID crisis, where he told the people, “I’m a messiah, but I don’t do miracles,” as his ill-prepared country took on the highest death toll outside the U.S. — spells Bolsonaro’s defeat to Lula during the latter’s comeback four years later.

And yet, the many evangelical powers in play, whose apocalyptic visions of Christianity were inspired by an all-too-literal reading of the Book of Revelation centuries ago, and who see Jesus as a violent martyr rather than a figure of peace and brotherly love, do not take their electoral loss lightly. Taking cues from the Jan. 6 riots, they and other Bolsonaro supporters storm government buildings in the capital of Brasília and make their way into the Supreme Court, which they hold responsible for validating Lula’s victory — breaking windows, smashing statues and leaving the place trashed.

Those same institutions are seen at the very start of Costa’s arresting film, in black-and-white archival footage of Oscar Niemeyer supervising the construction of Brasília, one of his greatest architectural legacies. That was back in 1960, when the country’s hopes of becoming a democratic force in the south were still vibrant. But then a military dictatorship, lasting roughly 20 years after the new capital was inaugurated, would quash those hopes for some time.

In Apocalypse in the Tropics, Costa reveals how those dreams are threatened once again, by violent religious forces that have only grown in number and influence over the past decades. The desecration of Niemeyer’s historic buildings after the 2022 elections was not only real but symbolic, and the director hints at this by inserting close-ups of Biblical paintings by artists like Bosch and Bruegel, which reflect Costa’s images of the present. By linking the two, she argues that for those concerned with Brazilian democracy’s future, it’s not apocalypse then, but now.