How the movie I’m Nonetheless Right here forces Brazil to face a dictatorship’s legacy
However the movie has discovered resonance within the current in addition to the previous, as Brazil grapples with the fallout of a modern-day coup try.
Simply final month, President Lula marked the second anniversary of a riot in Brasilia’s Three Powers Plaza, the place protesters had hoped to spark one other army rebellion.
Hundreds of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro descended on the plaza on January 8, 2023, only a week after Lula took workplace for a 3rd, nonconsecutive time period.
There, the rioters ransacked the Supreme Court docket, the Nationwide Congress constructing and the presidential palace in Brasilia, clashing with safety officers. Police say the violence was a part of a multipronged try and oust Lula and return Bolsonaro to energy.
Lucas Figueiredo, a journalist and writer of a number of books concerning the dictatorship, believes a lack of information concerning the previous has allowed many Brazilians to romanticise the period of army rule.
“To today, the army sees itself as having the correct to try a coup d’etat within the twenty first century. That is ample proof that no reminiscence has been constructed up about these occasions,” Figueiredo mentioned.
A former military captain, Bolsonaro has publicly defended the army dictatorship and expressed nostalgia for that interval.
Throughout his presidency, from 2019 to 2022, he additionally gutted the Amnesty Fee and the Particular Fee on Political Deaths and Disappearances — two panels designed to doc and reply to the human rights abuses of the previous.
When requested concerning the movie I’m Nonetheless Right here, Bolsonaro instructed a Bloomberg reporter, “I’m not even going to waste my time.”
Figueiredo believes the truth that no officers had been punished for his or her position within the army dictatorship has helped gasoline the present-day turmoil.
“This created a dynamic of impunity which favours attitudes like those we noticed on January 8,” Figueiredo mentioned.
However Marcia Carneiro, who teaches historical past on the Fluminense Federal College, noticed that the sense of impunity could also be fading, given the push to carry Bolsonaro and his allies accountable.
On February 18, Brazil’s prime prosecutor, Paulo Gonet, filed fees in opposition to Bolsonaro and 33 others, accusing them of plotting to overthrow the federal government. Bolsonaro might face many years in jail if convicted.
“There’s a new consciousness rising that those that act in opposition to the rule of legislation will be punished. That is fascinating and new in Brazil,” Carneiro mentioned.
If Bolsonaro had been in energy, Carneiro believes the movie I’m Nonetheless Right here might have been greeted with protests and even assaults.
She identified that, below Bolsonaro in 2019, protesters launched Molotov cocktails on the headquarters of the comedy group Porta dos Fundos, within the wake of a brief Christmas movie on Netflix that portrayed Jesus as homosexual.
However even the politics of the movie might have blunted a few of the right-wing criticisms. I’m Nonetheless Right here focuses intimately on the facility of household, sketching an idyllic house life disrupted by violence.
Consultants say its emphasis on household dynamics over politics has made it interesting to a large viewers.
“Everybody has a household — a mom, a father — and is affected after they see them struggling. Viewers recognise the potential of one thing like this taking place of their house,” Carneiro defined.
