By Rafa Sales Ross
Petra Costa on How Fake News Influenced Brazil's 2018 Parliamentary Elections | Amanpour and Company
Four years after being nominated for an Oscar for “The Edge of Democracy,” director Petra Costa is back to examine the current state of Brazilian politics with the documentary “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” which will have its world premiere in the Out of Competition section of the Venice Film Festival.
The film, originally teased as a snapshot of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s notoriously poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, morphed into an interrogation of how democracies transition into theocracies and the role of the country’s growing evangelical movement in Brazil’s recent political unrest. For reference, Brazil’s evangelical population in the 1980s was 5%. Now it’s more than 30%.
“The film is a continuation of an investigation I began with ‘The Edge of Democracy,’” Costa tells Variety. Two of the film’s key scenes were captured during the filming of her previous documentary, including the opening scene in which a group of evangelists bless Congress and speak in tongues prior to the 2016 impeachment vote on Dilma Rousseff.
