Acting
Dilma Vana Rousseff is a Brazilian economist and politician who served as the 36th president of Brazil, holding the position from 2011 until her impeachment and removal from office on 31 August 2016.
The movie is a collage and comentary of varied third party footage on news relating to each and every one of the eight Presidents of Brazil who took office since the end of the military government, from José Sarney to Jair Bolsonaro.
A documentary feature film about the biggest global corruption scandal in history, and the hundreds of journalists who risked their lives to break the story.
Brazil has a long tradition of coup d'états. These coups would have not been viable without the support of the big media, particularly TV Globo. Two Brazilian journalists in the UK reveal the manipulative tactics of these organisations.
The fading of composer Zé Keti’s career. The sad portrait of Brazilian Congress closed in 1977. The pain of a mother who lost her 15-year old daughter run over by a car. The Brazilian Presidents since Castelo Branco. Characters and settings registered through the keen and sensitive perspective of photographer Orlando Brito, in a career spanning 50 years as a professional. From the political sidelines to the lives of Brazilians from the interior, Brito recalls experiences and discusses the role of the photographer and the pain of registering someone’s grief.
When numerous schools in São Paulo were slated to be closed in 2015 as a result of the worsening socio-political crisis, students occupied more than a thousand public buildings in an unprecedented act of self-empowerment. Filmmaker Eliza Capai shows the development of the many-voiced protests, using news excerpts, self-conducted interviews and recordings made with activists’ own cell phone cameras. From the first demonstrations in 2013 and continuing all the way to the election of the extreme right-wing presidential Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, Capai’s highly political work becomes more and more relevant with each passing day.
The impeachment and removal from office of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was triggered by a corruption scandal involving, among others, her then vice-president Michel Temer. Director Maria Augusta Ramos follows the trial against Rousseff from the point of view of her defence team. This is a courtroom drama that unfolds slowly: the appearances of the various parties gradually turn the proceedings into something akin to theatre. Inside the courtroom, grand emotions are played to full effect whilst, on the other side of the doors, lobbyists and supporters pace the corridors. Meanwhile, outside, in front of Brasília’s modernist government buildings, demonstrators are chanting like a Greek chorus. Only the main character, Rousseff herself, remains professional and aloof.
During 2016, a film crew embeds inside the Brazilian Congress while lawmakers plot to overthrow the country's elected president, Dilma Rousseff.