“Religion and Politics in Contemporary Brazil”
Karen Genschow (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Apocalypse in the Tropics (2024) is Petra Costa’s sequel to The Edge of Democracy (2019), which documented the rise of the political right and Jair Bolsonaro’s ascent to power in Brazil, as well as the impeachment of the social democrat President Dilma Rousseff. It is part of a series of Brazilian documentaries addressing the political unrest in the country since Roussef’s removal from office in 2016, Lula’s imprisonment, and Bolsonaro’s presidency, including O processo (Maria Ramos, 2018), Excelentíssimos (Douglas Duarte, 2018), Alvorada (Anna Muylaert, 2021), and especially O céu da pátria nesse instante (Sandra Kogut, 2025), which deals with Bolsonaro’s attempted coup after Lula’s 2022 election victory and the storming of the parliament in January 2023.
Apocalpyse in the Tropics explores the role of Evangelicals in Brazilian politics and society, highlighting their growing influence and potential threat to Brazilian democracy. The film begins with a lengthy, associative sequence connecting various spaces and times: tight shots of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights visually introduce the apocalyptic worldview of these religious groups. This sequence is followed by scenes of the parliament in Brasília, with dramatic clouds overhead; archival footage of Brasília’s construction in 1960, symbolizing a new beginning; scenes from the 2016 political crisis; Evangelical parliamentarians; a performance by Evangelical priest Silas Malafaia; and Lula’s 2017 arrest. Costa’s voice-over expresses her desire to understand the political-religious phenomenon of Evangelicals, their worldview, and their significance for Brazilian politics. The prologue is followed by five chapters: “The Kingmaker,” “God in the Time of Cholera,” “Dominion,” “Genesis,” and finally “Holy War,” and an epilogue titled “The Revelation.” This division reveals the film’s fundamental thrust: the intention to analyze the complex and chronologically extensive subject matter and to address it also as a problem of representation and aesthetics. The latter becomes evident in the intertextual references of the titles that allude to biblical and religious concepts as well as to García Márquez’ novel Love in the Time of Cholera.
The first chapter focuses on Malafaia, the film’s main character, leader of the Assembly of God church, who has been highly visible in the media for many years and is a central figure in Brazilian politics, playing the role of kingmaker. After supporting Lula in 2002, he was instrumental in Bolsonaro’s rise to the presidency in 2017. Costa uses archival material, scenes from Malafaia’s public appearances, and interviews conducted at his home to reveal his confidence, sense of power, and support for right-wing causes—against LGBTQ rights, same-sex marriage, abortion, social justice, and rights for indigenous and Afro-Brazilian populations– rooted in an ideal of a “white” Brazil. Malafaia is portrayed as a power politician aware of Bolsonaro’s intellectual limitations and skilled at exploiting them for his ideological and political goals. He repeatedly boasts of having direct access to the president and claims that Bolsonaro listens to him on all matters. The second chapter examines the COVID-19 pandemic during Bolsonaro’s presidency and the government’s neglect, especially in the Amazon region. Bolsonaro and Evangelicals interpret the pandemic as God’s will, a sign of the end times and the return of Jesus. The visuals, partly from Brazilian television and partly from Costa’s own footage, show a dystopian scenario: helpers in protective suits disinfecting subway stations, Evangelicals praying in the streets, mass graves in Manaus, Amazonas, and desperate relatives of COVID victims dying due to oxygen shortages and government inaction. Paintings of the Last Judgement, such as Hans Memling’s, displayed in this chapter symbolize the long (European) history of apocalyptic themes, create aesthetic references and allude to a colonial configuration of this religious belief which is only taken up again in chapter 4. “Genesis” traces the origins of Evangelicalism in Brazil, analyzing it as part of a neocolonial project that started in the late 1950s in the USA, which was exported to Brazil through missionary work as an anti-communist strategy, particularly to oppose liberation theology. Costa draws on archival footage of influential preacher Billy Graham’s visit to Brazil and his sermons before thousands of believers. The mass scenes during the 2022 election, Bolsonaro’s ousting, and protests against it transition into the fifth chapter, which begins with detailed images of the painting The Last Judgement by Fra Angelico, exploring Evangelicals’ passionate focus on the end of the world.
These references to medieval European apocalyptic paintings – Bosch’s The Hay Wain, Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death and The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Rubens’ The Fall of the Damned, among others – are an important resource in the visual composition of the film. One might question whether these European medieval artworks adequately reflect Latin American realities; however, in Costa’s analysis of the neocolonial origins of Evangelicalism, this “exterritorial” visuality can be justified. It reveals both the distant perspective the film takes on this social, political, and religious phenomenon and its outline of an implicit spectator conceived as “international.” In this regard, the film’s language policy is noteworthy: there are two versions of Costa’s voice-over, one in Portuguese and one in English. The fact that both versions are identical in content reinforces the sense that the film is aimed at an international, non-Brazilian audience, which guides the overall direction of the narration – unlike, for example, the aforementioned No céu da pátria nesse instante, which is clearly aimed at a Brazilian audience and dispenses with an overarching narrative and voice-over.
The epilogue shows disturbing images of the storming of the three branches of government – the executive, judicial, and legislative, all of which are located in Brasília’s Praça dos Tres Poderes – after the presidential election in early 2023. These scenes – collage-like compositions in various formats, apparently filmed by different people – are familiar to Brazilian viewers; the images of empty, destroyed and devastated rooms after the storm were taken by Costa herself. With their aestheticised gaze, which arises from contemplative long shots and the alternation between wide and close-up shots on symbolically loaded details, they powerfully illustrate the crisis of democracy in the terms that the film explores and proposes. It ends with these images, accompanied by a reflection on the word “apocalypse,” which in Greek means “revelation” and thus the “opportunity to open one’s eyes,” as Costa hopefully puts it. This points at the fundamentally optimistic vision of representative democracy on which Costa’s film is based. It therefore does not undertake any analysis of the crisis of representative democracies that affects many countries around the world—not only Brazil—due to inherent flaws and in terms of a legitimacy crisis, with right-wing forces benefiting the most.
The film is based on extensive research, as the bibliography in the credits shows, yet the subject matter seems almost too complex for a single documentary. Costa’s film necessarily takes its own, situated view, based on her own stated atheism and thus a certain lack of understanding of the phenomenon of the Evangelicals. Although she gains access to the protagonists and is able to film in the parliament and at Malafaia’s home, her perspective remains an external one. In this respect, an example of her situatedness is the fact that Apocalypse in the Tropics largely overlooks progressive currents among Evangelicals, such as the Afro-Brazilian PT deputy Benedita da Silva, who is briefly shown supporting Lula. There is one sequence depicting a progressive Evangelical priest, but its brevity only suggests and does not explore the fact that Evangelicals are not a homogeneous group.
Two brief interview scenes with a cleaning lady and her teenage daughter—who supports Lula while her mother votes for Bolsonaro under her priest’s influence—fail to fully capture the complexity of voter behavior. Unlike in The Edge of Democracy, Costa’s privileged and well-established perspective as the daughter of a wealthy and influential family is not addressed here. In this respect, one could speak not only of a certain distance from the ‘people’ (who appear here as something of a mystery) and a reduction of the threat to democracy to evangelicals, while ignoring the influence of other groups (the agro-industry) and, above all, the interests of the oligarchy – who act less spectacularly, but are just as detrimental to democracy. Apocalypse in the Tropics is undoubtedly an aesthetically compelling, analytically sophisticated and rewarding cinematic essay. The reductions it makes in favor of its narrativity, its faith in representative democracy, and its directedness at a non-Brazilian audience – a common trait of most “festival films”– ensure though, that the Western (“international”) view is not overly disturbed.
“What Comes After the End?”
Gustavo Furtado (Duke University)
Though Brazil has much in common with its South American neighbors (among which, a two-decade period of military dictatorship during the Cold War), it also bears more than a passing resemblance to the United States. Recent events in the two countries, such as the rise of populist leaders who believe that elections are fair only when they win, echo one another. Democratic institutions that took long to build are under strain in both places, and Brazil even had its own version of the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. On January 8th of 2023, the followers of Jair Bolsonaro, refusing to allow the peaceful transfer of power to democratically-elected President Lula, vandalized government buildings in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia. Both countries have also seen the rise of the political alliance between evangelical Christians and the far Right that is gaining ground at every level of government and challenging the separation of church and state. This, in the Brazilian context, is the topic of Petra Costa’s latest film, Apocalypse in the Tropics (Apocalipse nos trópicos, 2025).
As the title indicates, the film is rife with reflections on “end times” thinking—an apt topic, as the 21st century seems to provide ample apocalyptic scenarios, including the crumbling of democracies. Costa’s film is especially interested in the contemporary relevance of Christian eschatology and of theological interpretations of the Biblical Book of Revelation. At one point in the film, she discusses the nineteenth-century Irish theologian, John Darby. While Christians of his time believed that Christ would return after a prolonged period of peace, Darby interpreted the Book of Revelation to mean just the opposite: the worse things get, the sooner Jesus will come. From this perspective, there is little point in working towards the general wellbeing of humanity. This is a position held by many evangelicals, and there is evidence that the marriage of Church and State is indeed accelerating apocalyptic turns of events. During the COVID pandemic in Brazil, President Bolsonaro encouraged and personally participated in religious gatherings where the faithful prayed for deliverance from COVID, even while sabotaging efforts to thwart contagion. Footage of one such gathering is followed in the film by grim shots of cemeteries with dozens of freshly dug graves and staffed by people in hazmat suits. On the audio track accompanying this segment we hear recordings from people in hospitals pleading for oxygen tanks that the government failed to provide. Seven hundred thousand people died of COVID in Brazil, Costa reminds the viewer.
By her own definition, Costa makes essay films and draws inspiration from filmmakers like Chris Marker. Indeed, her three feature-length documentaries to date (Elena, from 2012, and The Edge of Democracy, from 2019) are poetic meditations narrated in a subjective, first-person voice. Beyond being guided by a first-person voice, the essay film is generally defined by its noncompliance with generic rules and conventions. “The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy,” Theodor Adorno claimed. At one level, Costa’s documentary might fall short of this definition as it defends the reasonable but rather commonplace position that the collapse of the separation between Church and State is terrible for democracy. This entirely valid claim seems to me too conventional a position for the essay film’s heretical potential. Yet, many of the film’s merits hinge precisely on its essayistic approach. An illustrative moment occurs in a segment that combines shots of details from apocalyptic paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel the Elder with a voiceover citation from Nietzsche’s “Parable of the Madman” about the consequences of humanity’s murder of God. Costa then notes in a confessional tone: “I used to think that with time we would no longer rely on religion. Now I see how arrogant that idea was.” This segment reveals the film’s ethos of sincere and open-minded inquiry into its subject: religion. More importantly, however, it puts in question an understanding of history as the progress of reason, a gradual but inevitable demystification of the world that would exorcise religion, as it were. This view, which tacitly undergirds much progressive thought, partly accounts for the sense of befuddlement and anachronism caused by scenes of religious revival taking place in the halls of government. I would argue that the essay film can do its best work precisely at this juncture—that is, where what is taken-for-granted falls apart.
Besides the presumed disappearance of religion, the film deals with other unfilled futurities. One of the film’s best traits, in fact, is the way it thinks through images about competing temporalities. This is illustrated in the very first shots of the film, starting with a detail from Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights showing an anxious crowd climbing from a pool of water into a broken egg. From this, Costa cuts to a shot showing the dome-shaped buildings of Brazil’s National Congress, seen through the round window frame of a neighboring building—the repetition of circular shapes evoking Bosch’s egg as well as of Brasilia’s modernist architecture. She then cuts to an aerial shot showing the construction of the National Congress within a wide-open terrain and follows this with a sequence of more archival shots of the construction of Brasilia in the late 1950s—including one that is probably from a 1985 celebration of Brazil’s return to democracy. Varied temporalities abound in this montage (which is echoed in other moments of the film). The image of people climbing into a broken egg suggests a desperate effort to turn back time. The shots of Brazil’s capital bring up other temporal meanings. Brasilia, which was built as the flagship project of a government that promised to accelerate the country’s modernization “fifty years in five,” looks full of promise in the construction shots. The contemporary shots of the city, by contrast, show it as a patina-covered monument from the past. Brasilia’s futurism now seems passé—and some later shots of tunnels in the film embody this contradiction by looking at once sci-fi and grungy.
In the final segment, Costa incorporates haunting footage of the depredated government buildings filmed the day after the mob’s invasion. It is an apocalyptic view but, as she notes in voiceover, the Greek word “apocalypse” actually means “an unveiling.” The film looks at the images of destruction and at ideas of the end of the world in an effort to see what they might reveal. There is a timely ambiguity established here between the evocation of end times and the effort to unveil some future beyond catastrophic endings. Reminding us that similar situations can produce varied outcomes and futures, Brazil has just sentenced Bolsonaro and his accomplices to hefty prison sentences for plotting a coup.
DOCALOGUE 