How Brazilian Cinema Survived Fascism

When writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho was on a press junket with his sensational genre-twisting, furiously satirical 2019 film, Bacurau, Brazilian cinema was in a state of crisis. Jair Bolsonaro’s oppressive right-wing government targeted the national cinema for destruction, aggressively slashing budgets, halting funding, canceling projects, and leaving thousands of films at various stages of development stuck in limbo. Punitive policies were tied to ideological manias such as Bolsonaro’s open hostility to members of the LGBTQ population, which led to government attempts to ban their favorable representation on-screen.

Mendonça, a former journalist and outspoken leftist who frequently participated in anti-Bolsonaro protests, somehow kept making films that seemed designed to madden Bolsonarists. Set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife and his native Northeast Brazil, they find inventive ways to revive the Cinema Novo tendency to explore the region’s harsh history of colonialism, political corruption, economic exploitation, and oppression in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality. His work critiques the amnesiac state encouraged by the Brazilian amnesty law of 1979, which granted blanket pardons to the military government for political crimes committed from 1961 to 1979, including, by implication, the murder, torture, and forced disappearance of thousands of Brazilians. The citizenry was encouraged to forgive and forget the brutalities of military dictatorship, even as the Bolsonaro government seemed to wallow in nostalgia for it. 

Issues of history, memory, and the past repeating itself are central to Mendonça’s The Secret Agent (2025), a period thriller set in 1977. It’s about a mild-mannered professor, played by Wagner Moura, who gets targeted for assassination by the military government and finds refuge in a safe house for dissidents in Recife. Viewing it, Mendonça’s friends immediately said that he’d made a film that “was actually about the last few years living in Brazil” under Bolsonaro.

What a difference six years can make. By the time Mendonça was once again attending film festivals and participating in press junkets for the successful and politically fierce Secret Agent, Bolsonaro was being tried for his failed attempt at a coup, for which he would be sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison, while President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (generally known as Lula) was back in power. Mendonça was exulting in the national cinematic revival. “Once Lula came back and Bolsonaro lost the election, the whole system was brought back,” as he put it. “So now Brazilian cinema is back.”

This revival seems almost miraculous when considered against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s two terms. There is much leftist despair in the United States right now over whether there will be any recovery from the political and cultural destruction of government agencies, systems supporting scientific advancement, arts and education, racial equality, national health, international aid, and environmental protections. Though the cinema of the United States — never reliant on government funding, which is almost nonexistent — hasn’t been decimated by Trump, it seems to be slowly falling apart regardless.

The Trump administration was ideologically aligned and strongly supportive of the Brazilian government under Bolsonaro, to the point that the latter’s imitative policies earned him the description the “Trump of the Tropics.” But Trump is generally harshly critical of the Lula presidency. Under Bolsonaro, Brazil was given favorable trading status and validation of its many corrupt and destructive Trumpian policies. This is consistent with a long and appalling US history of aggressive interference in South American politics, bolstering right-wing power and subverting left-wing power.

There’s an equally long history of US cinema’s oppressive effects on the region’s national cinemas. At its early-twentieth-century height, the US film industry sought domination of international cinemas — with Hollywood films sometimes monopolizing nearly 100 percent of screens in South American countries — and often enacted punitive measures against nations that attempted to save their own industries. Added to this, the United States routinely poached top talent from other countries, offering the highest salaries and the broadest distribution reach to established directors and nationally known film stars especially. Few could resist the possibility of becoming globally famous.

Though Brazil had an established film industry of its own in the early silent film era, movies from the United States were so overwhelmingly popular from the mid-1910s through the 1950s that the country became one of Hollywood’s biggest export markets. Hollywood films dominated screens and gave rise to similar glossy movies made in Hollywood-imitating studio systems in Brazil. 

Periodic forays into strengthening Brazil’s homegrown cinema arose at points when turmoil in Hollywood provided opportunities for other national film industries. In the late 1920s, for example, when the silent era waned as talkies became popular, attempts were made in South American film industries like Brazil’s and Argentina’s to take advantage of the local preference for movies with dialogue spoken in Portuguese or Spanish instead of English. It took several years before Hollywood studios figured out systems of dubbing and subtitling that would allow US cinema to recover its overwhelming global appeal. In a brief window of time up to the early 1930s, several new Brazilian studios were established to produce Brazilian-made, Portuguese-language movies: Cinédia, Sonofilms, and Brasil Vita Filmes.

But shaky success in aligning their films with local working-class tastes led Brazilian cinemas to increasingly depend on state cultural development agencies and their funding for survival. Indeed, partial reliance on government funding would be the route taken by the majority of national film industries globally — including in Western Europe  — particularly after World War II. 

As Hollywood’s international power at last began to decline throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, new national cinemas sprung up around the world, while existing national cinemas grabbed their chance to feature local films and homegrown talent on-screen. In Brazil, the highly influential and politically radical Cinema Novo movement arose. Influenced in part by European art house movements like Italian neorealism and the French New Wave, this gritty tendency founded itself on the rejection of Hollywood commercial film products and practices, turning toward low-budget, on-location, guerrilla-style filmmaking, often in remote, impoverished rural regions of Brazil, where economic injustice, colonial exploitation, and political oppression were starkly apparent. 

The form’s most prominent filmmaker, Glauber Rocha, wrote an incendiary manifesto called The Aesthetics of Hunger. But Cinema Novo was forced into disguise with the military coup of 1964, when filmmakers like Rocha pivoted toward surrealist allegory to avoid censorship and reprisals.

It is Cinema Novo that Mendonça most consistently evokes in his own work. His insistence on filming in and around the sunbaked terrain of Northeast Brazil is itself a Cinema Novo tendency. Mendonça portrays a largely economically struggling rural and small-town proletariat. As Juliano Dornelles, Mendonça’s codirector on Bacurau, has put it, “The Northeast is where maids in São Paulo come from, and where Kleber and I are from. We wanted an adventure where we are the heroes.”

The central adventure in Bacurau, their contribution to the Weird Western genre, involves the impoverished title community’s struggle to battle a multipronged onslaught that recalls the long, tortured colonial history of the region. Besieging the town are corrupt politicians attempting to control precious water rights in combination with sinister foreigners roaming the area from the United States, Australia, and Europe (specifically Germany, in the form of the ever-menacing Udo Kier). There may also be UFOs involved, given the sophistication of the technology arrayed against the community, which wipes the town from satellite maps. But whoever the attackers are, the people of Bacurau intend to fight them off by any means necessary.

Given his political tendencies, how did Mendonça manage to keep functioning as a filmmaker under Bolsonaro’s crackdown on the film industry? It was largely by relying on his own established reputation, and consequent international coproduction opportunities, to bolster private investments and already approved public funding. Even with those advantages, however, he faced hostile showdowns with the government. During the 2019 Bacurau premiere, it sued to reclaim funds from his 2012 feature debut, Neighboring Sounds, claiming the director had gone over budget. Brazil’s Ministry of Culture, which had awarded the funds to Mendonça in the first place, had been abolished by Bolsonaro. In interviews at the time, Mendonça said:

Everything we did to adapt the budget was consulted with the Brazilian Film Agency and the Ministry of Culture at the time. . . .  Unfortunately, there was a takeover of power, and the Ministry of Culture was taken over by people from the right who now saw an opportunity to begin to sabotage Brazilian cinema.

But as Mendonça likes to crow, Brazilian cinema is back, baby.