Of the countless jawdropping moments in “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” one of the most may be the quietest and most relatable as Silas Malafaia is driving in his car down a busy thoroughfare in his native Brazil and becomes wildly angry at a fellow driver for cutting him off in traffic. It is unexpected because Malafaia is a man of the cloth, in charge of one of the largest congregations in the country after inheriting a much smaller flock from his father-in-law and clearly isn’t one to believe in turning the other cheek, but it’s unbelievable that Petra Costa was allowed to sit in the backseat to capture it all, given his proximity to then-President Jair Bolsanaro, whose core constituency was made up of the evangelical Christians that Malafaia preached to. A later scene of Malafaia driving into the Presidential Headquarters in Brazil with barely a security check actually worries the minister, who says to Costa, “See how easy it is to get in? It’s absurd.”
It would’ve been much harder for Malafaia to get into the building, at least in political terms, in any earlier era in Brazil. But after tracking the rise of far-right politicians such as Bolsanaro by using specious claims to impeach Dilma Rousseff, the first female president of Brazil, and imprisoning her predecessor Lula da Silva in her previous feature, the essential 21st century text “The Edge of Democracy,” Costa finds how Malafaia and a collection of other pastors broke down the wall between church and state to become massively influential in setting policy in Brazil and in their certitude about a future in which apocalypse is nigh, they had no problem letting Costa keep the cameras rolling when pressing on with destroying norms of a democratic society in order to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After Brazil had the second highest death toll in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic in part because of Bolsanaro’s anti-science beliefs, Costa couldn’t reconcile someone who was said to be such a big believer in Christ to be so indifferent to the suffering of so many he was sworn to serve, but her own soul searching in “Apocalypse in the Tropics,” complete with a tender voiceover that’s now become a trademark, becomes a riveting investigation into how democracies the world over ended up in such a precarious spot, honing in on a moment in Brazil’s history where American evangelical Christians started looking to appeal to others abroad. Perhaps trips by Billy Graham during the 1970s didn’t yield immediate results, but as if to hold up a mirror to what ended up happening in the country he came from, Costa shows a vicious cycle that he and others introduced when courting conservative politicians to cut the social safety net with legislation and then suggesting to those same people whose lives were most impacted that they were also the answer to their problems, counting on a lack of resources such as education to prevent any connection being made.
However, that connection is made undeniable by Costa in “Apocalypse in the Tropics” and even though it is the product of a movement that took decades, the film shows how difficult it is for the true believers to shake, even if the political aims of the church is at odds with actual religious text and the policies pursued are working against their self-interests. With extraordinary access and rigorous research, Costa once again makes sense of wacky and turbulent times that may show how susceptible any individual nation is to tyranny but also offers at least some hope when observing a time in which Bolsanaro is compelled to flee under charges of helping to orchestrate an assassination attempt as his supporters ransack the presidential palace once Lula is voted into office once more. Of all days, Costa and I spoke as the film was made available the world over to stream on Netflix, not long after President Trump announced he was looking into new tariffs on Brazil should the legal case into Bolsonaro’s traitorous acts continue to make its way through court (a threat that’s already backfired), and the director spoke about the surreal experience of making a film that appears as if it will be able to speak to the current moment for quite some time, putting history on camera at the same time she’s processing the history of decades before in her research, and how a test of Brazilian government could show how strong it actually is.
Given how much “The Edge of Democracy” must’ve taken out of you, I wondered if following it up was easier or harder, knowing what an undertaking it was?
Yes, it was interesting because when I was releasing “The Edge of Democracy,” I had a few people who told me, “Oh, you have to make a sequel now about Bolsonaro’s government,” and I was like, “Oh, I’m never gonna do that.” But what happened was that in March 2020, when the pandemic began and hit Brazil, it felt impossible not to document what was the worst crisis in our history. So we grabbed the camera and started filming, and when the material started coming back, what was really jumped to our eyes was the presence of evangelical pastors everywhere delivering essential services to the communities, but also in some cases saying that Jesus would cure COVID and it was great that Bolsonaro won – he was creating chaos, but that was good because it was accelerating the apocalypse of the second coming of Christ. That particular apocalyptic theology was something that intrigued me, and together with things that I had already filmed for “The Edge of Democracy,” scenes that are in the beginning of the film that really show this marriage of religion and politics, and this plan of taking over the three branches of power, that’s when we decided to make a film really focusing on this marriage.
The evangelical movement is quite large, but you come to focus on Silas Maiafaia. How did he come to the fore?
We started filming with Malafaia, first as an interview, and then he [let] us accompany him in several situations, including when he flew to meet with the president, and as we saw the material, it became very clear for everyone that he was a metonym of what we wanted to portray. Not only that, but over the four years that we filmed with him, it was fascinating to see how his influence over the president only grew. In the beginning, he was just one of many allies, and some died, others [Bolsonaro] fought with, and Silas grew in prominence to the point where, as you see in the film, he was possibly even writing Bolsonaro’s most inflamed speech when he attacks the Supreme Court and the crowd asks for military intervention. To this day, Silas Malafaia is currently organizing and paying for rallies once every two months in defense of Bolsonaro’s impunity. And we know [Bolsonaro is] currently being tried for the alleged coup attempt that, if successful, would have killed Lula, his vice president, and the Supreme Court justice.
I remember you worked with Carol Pires, a journalist, on “The Edge of Democracy,” and I understand you may have had a similar collaboration that helped you get your foot in the door with Malafaia.
Yes. We worked with Ana Carolina Evangelista, who is a journalist that’s been covering the evangelical movement since 2010, both because of her knowledge of the movement and her longstanding relationship with Silas Malafaia. Ana Carolina really understands many of the subtleties of the evangelical movement in Brazil and its influence over politics that has only been growing since 2010. She didn’t work directly on the script with us, as Carol Pires did, so it was more being on the ground, but it was a wonderful collaboration.
This involves so much research and yet it looks like there was never a break from filming. How did those processes intertwine?
I really love essay filmmaking in the sense that I don’t come to any film with the thesis. I come with an instinct, with an idea, and then it’s the film material that we have that starts to inform the story we’re going to tell. In this case, it was even more so. We were really guiding ourselves from what we were filming and what the material was revealing to us. Once we decided to really dig into this intersection of religion and politics, I started researching where did the evangelical movement that came to Brazil come from. It was a very uncanny discovery, discovering the role of Billy Graham [for instance], which was a figure that I didn’t even know of, or Jerry Falwell, and how they played the role of inserting evangelical fundamentalism into mainstream American politics that now has led so much to the current political situation in the United States. But what was very interesting to see that what took place in the United States from the ’50s to 2025 – 75 years -happened in Brazil over 15 years, a much shorter period of time. Before 2011, almost no evangelical pastor really spoke about politics the way Billy Graham or Jerry Falwell were doing in the United States. In Brazil, it was a much more condensed, rapid transformation and arrival of Dominion theology that now is the theology that most prominent evangelical pastors really identify with and are very aligned with the far right.
This seems to be as much for an American audience as a Brazilian one, though it could be for anyone. Did you have an audience in mind while putting this together?
I agree with Tolstoy that you tell the story of a village and that’s where you find the universal. I find that I don’t need to translate this, because I’m speaking about a phenomenon that many of us around the world are feeling, which is the feeling of a citizen having his or her own democracy hijacked, right? This is unfortunately becoming a universal feeling as autocracies rise and there’s less and less democracies around the world. If you look clearly and dive with intimacy enough into one phenomenon, I think you really find a key to understanding how it happens around the world. And there’s something about Brazil wherethings happen really fast, [which] I think has to do with how much Brazilians use social media and also that we’re very boisterous and colorful, it becomes like an exaggerated mirror of a phenomenon that you’re seeing around the world.
Like “The Edge of Democracy,” you find reflections of cultural attitudes or political ideas that aren’t obvious and quite artful, such as once again showing how the development of government buildings amplified ideas of what Brazilians wanted their government to become and using religious paintings as illustrations for ideas of the evangelical movement created long before they were popular. How did you decide on the non-verite visual elements?
There’s a German choreographer that I love – Pina Bausch, who says, “I’m not interested in how people move, but what moves people.” And that translates so much of what is my desire in art and documentary filmmaking. I’m not interested in just showing how the evangelical movement currently moves in Brazil in relation to politics, but what moves the leaders and the congregations to adopt this apocalyptic theology that has grave political consequences.
To do that, you have to create more than one layer, so I have the layer of politics in the here and now of the last five years and for that layer, I always wanted to have a pulse of Brazilian society in the streets, in Congress, in the presidential palace. And in the other layer, we always wanted to get into the biblical text that was inspiring this apocalyptic and dominionist theology, so we went into the Book of Revelations. It’s a fascinating book, and one of the most cinematic pieces of text that exists and is throughout Western art from Bosch and Bruegel to Marx. They all drank from this source.
But [there was a question of] how to translate it into image. At first we thought, let’s try to film these surrealist images of the moon turning into blood or a pregnant woman fighting with a dragon. And then my editor David Barker had the genius idea of what if we do it with paintings? Because that was how Christians were relating with these apocalyptic texts during the entire Middle Ages – through paintings and these paintings were really the horror films, the Instagrams, the visual images that were populating people’s unconscious. I was very moved by the power of these images. I remember the first day I bought a book of apocalyptic paintings, I couldn’t sleep at night. I had nightmares with these images, so it was a beautiful way of really immersing ourselves visually in the power of this text.
Of course, the other layer is the layer of democracy and luckily enough, we have a capital in Brasilia that is a visual depiction of how a democracy should work in theory, even though I think it was a very bad idea in practice. With the tragedy of the destruction of January 8th, that really bookended the film [because we thought] if it ends with the destruction, let’s go into the construction of Brasilia and these three layers oriented us. They interact with each other because the film is really a meditation upon faith because you need not only faith in religion, but for democracy to exist. That’s something that doesn’t necessarily cross our mind. It seems objective and like a given, but if we lose faith in democracy then the democratic agreement is lost it’s an invisible agreement between citizens that if and the faith is the cement right that holds it together.
It’s wild to me that we were originally supposed to do this interview shortly before the news that Trump had threatened tariffs against Brazil if the current investigation into Bolsanaro wasn’t dropped and for better or worse, this film seems like it’s going to be relevant for some time. What’s it like to make something that can engage with the moment like that?
Yes, it is strange how it updates itself with the news, particularly this news that I think has everything to do with the film. It traces the genesis of how Bolsonaro comes to power and then in power tries to erode all the democratic norms to the point of allegedly inspiring a coup and conspiring for a coup against democracy. Now to have Trump the president of the most powerful nation in the world threatening Brazil with 50% tariffs if the country does not stop the “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro as he says who did similar things as he did, it synthesizes all the parallels that the film was tracing in one tweet that is a threat into the sovereignty of our country and our judicial system, which thankfully is doing its job for the first time in the history of a country of successive military coups — really investigating Bolsonaro and trying the people who possibly conspired for this coup. That’s something that never happened in Brazil. It’s historic and I hope and believe that these foreign interferences will not stop our trials from having their necessary independence to exist.
“Apocalypse in the Tropics” is now streaming on Netflix.