Five years after her fantastic, Oscar-nominated film 'The Edge of Democracy', the documentary filmmaker takes stock of the far-right Bolsonaro era. The resulting film is likely to resonate beyond Brazil.

For opponents of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—that is, opponents of indigenous discrimination, deforestation, abortion bans, institutional homophobia and COVID denial, among other things—his loss in the 2022 general election was a relief, but hardly a new beginning. The presidency may be returned to veteran liberal Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (popularly known as Lula) of the center-left Workers’ Party, but the demographic shifts and political machinations that enabled the far-right’s recent takeover still cast a long shadow over a country racked by economic inequality and social unrest. “Nothing is hidden that will not be made public,” says Petra Costa, borrowing aptly from the book of Lucas, midway through her compellingly impassioned new documentary “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” which rakes through the recent past with a heavy heart while casting an anxious gaze toward the future.

The heartwarming expressions of shame, fear and fragile, glimmering hope that run throughout “Apocalypse in the Tropics” will come as no surprise to viewers who saw Costa’s previous documentary, “The Edge of Democracy” — to which her latest forms an obvious bookend. Released in 2019, on the heels of Bolsonaro’s election victory and while Lula was still in prison on corruption charges, that film explored at length the reasons behind Brazil’s dramatic shift to the right and viewed the new administration with openly vocal concern. A festival hit that garnered a buzzworthy Netflix release and an eventual Oscar nomination, “The Edge of Democracy” laid the groundwork for this sequel — which premiered out of competition in Venice, with Brad Pitt among its many executive producers — to similarly connect with audiences.

Five years and a global pandemic later, Costa may be happy to speak of Bolsonaro’s tenure in the past tense, but she’s not done parsing its origins and implications for the country as a whole. For related works released in starkly contrasting political climates, “The Edge of Democracy” and “Apocalypse in the Tropics” are strikingly similar in vision and approach. Which is not to say they share the same talking points. Much of the new film, as suggested by its title, which references Revelation, centers around a social phenomenon that Costa admits she underexplored in her last film: Brazil’s extraordinary turn to Evangelical Christianity, a movement that now accounts for more than 30% of the country’s population, up from 5% just 40 years ago.