Apocalypse in the Tropics

Where does a democracy end and a theocracy begin? Oscar-nominated filmmaker Petra Costa (The Edge of Democracy) investigates the increasingly powerful grip that evangelicals hold over politics in Brazil, home to one of the largest and swiftest religious shifts in human history. As Costa tells us in her haunting and insightful voiceover, evangelicals have risen from some 5% to 30% of the Brazilian population in just 40 years.

With extraordinary access to the country’s top leaders, including President Lulu da Silva, former President Jair Bolsonaro, and Bolsonaro’s right-hand man, popular Pentecostal televangelist Silas Malafaia, Costa offers a lucid, poetic, and chilling look at the ways in which fear, poverty, and apocalyptic theology can be exploited to consolidate power. It’s a brilliant and gripping case study about the precarity of contemporary democracies with clear resonances in the U.S. today.

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