Following the 2019 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, Edge of Democracy, Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa presents her spiritual sequel to it, Apocalypse in the Tropics. Five years after, the film narrates the downfall of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party), the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff from the presidency, and the election of Jair Bolsonaro, Petra studies the marriage between the surge of the far-right and the exponential growth of the Pentecostal evangelicals in Brazil. In recent years, Catholicism, the country’s main religion, has seen a decline in its membership, while Evangelical expressions have grown each year. In this sense, pastors became owners of media vehicles and mass communication outlets, such as publishing houses, radios, and TV stations. Therefore, the leadership of the massive communities understood their potential impact in electing pastors and collegiates to the congress, electing one hundred and forty-two congress members in the 2022 election.
The director is a household name in the Brazilian documentary community after the passing of the most important name of the genre, Eduardo Coutinho. Costa, with her 2013 film Elena, gained acclaim and commercial success. In terms of reputation within the international community, she became the principal name when talking about Brazilian documentary filmmaking. Her style of mixing archival footage with her poetic narration is the heart of her first feature film, which narrates the suicide of her older sister. But her Oscar-nominated documentary suffers from the insertion of the director’s self-centered observation of the destruction of the working-class policies. Costa is a member of the financial and cultural elite of the country; her grandfather is the founder of Andrade Guttierez, one of the most prominent construction corporations in Brazil. Democracy is the reflection of the left-leaning elites among the destruction of the democratic system established after the re-democratization of the country in 1985. A demolition caused by its involvement in corruption cases that wore out the left-leaning presidency, and the disruption funded by them to elect Bolsonaro in 2018.
Hence, Costa rejects a first-person narration in Apocalypse, which is the strongest stylistical choice in the past feature, and observes the systemic power of evangelism from the inside out. In her latest, the director is a more conventional narrator, similar to what Errol Morris does in his political documentaries, such as The Fog of War. She tries to understand the recent exponential force of the church as a political institution, in the post-truth reality, where the far-right manipulates mass communications through the internet and the figure of pastors as influencers.
Consequently, the film goes in a different direction from the former effort; it focuses on a specific subject, in the figure of Silas Malafaia, the leader of the Assembly of God in the Victory of Christ. He built an empire through a publishing house that would sell Bibles, and later became a TV host. The director places her cameras in proximity to the pastor, who in the past supported Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, the left icon, then would support right-wing candidates until the perfect trope in Bolsonaro. He was a former army member who became a congressman by praising the dictatorship in Brazil. In the resurgence of authoritarianism in Latin America and the world, Bolsonaro became the local hope of a conservative future. The director allows the pastor to speak loudly about the immense power of the evangelical community, an estimated thirty percent of the Brazilian population. There is an imminent power thirst in Malafaia’s discourse, which echoes his combative stance against the ‘communist plans’ of indoctrinating children, legalizing abortion, and spreading drug abuse in society.
The director takes a more straightforward approach to the narration of the recent political phenomena in Brazil. She divides into chapters a few of the most crucial events to understand the genesis of neo-Pentecostal institutions and the Brazilian state. As an example, the second chapter, God in Times of Cholera, emphasizes Bolsonaro’s denial of the COVID-19 pandemic and the use of faith as a solution to the sanitary crisis. This chapter shows a director who constructs impact in the imagery rather than her narration. The archival footage of a cemetery and mass digs to fulfill the necessity of burials. It is an impactful visual summary of the negligence of the past administration in Brazil. Nevertheless, the director presents plenty of sub-plots, especially about the working-class, and their religious bias in their political baggage. However, Costa does not develop a more intricate thesis on this matter.
Rightfully, Petra Costa watches the political and the religious contexts to merge from a distance, regarding her role as a narrator. She is trying to understand and share her conclusions with the audience, leaning towards a more traditional documentary structure than her past effort. It may never reach a profound enough conclusion about the theme. But the film is a timely cut of the past five years in Brazil, where the political chaos and religion were the principal actors in a crowded and loud political theater. Similar to the Greek dramaturgy, it is a complex and tragic representation of the human thirst for power and dominance. And Apocalypse in the Tropics is a mere glimpse into the entropy of a religious country that treats its political actors as Gods.
Apocalypse in the Tropics is now streaming on Netflix.
Learn more about the film at the official site for the title.
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