When writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho was on a press junket with his sensational genre-twisting, furiously satirical 2019 film, Bacurau, Brazilian cinema was in a state of crisis. Jair Bolsonaro’s oppressive right-wing government targeted the national cinema for destruction, aggressively slashing budgets, halting funding, canceling projects, and leaving thousands of films at various stages of development stuck in limbo. Punitive policies were tied to ideological manias such as Bolsonaro’s open hostility to members of the LGBTQ population, which led to government attempts to ban their favorable representation on-screen.

Mendonça, a former journalist and outspoken leftist who frequently participated in anti-Bolsonaro protests, somehow kept making films that seemed designed to madden Bolsonarists. Set in Mendonça’s hometown of Recife and his native Northeast Brazil, they find inventive ways to revive the Cinema Novo tendency to explore the region’s harsh history of colonialism, political corruption, economic exploitation, and oppression in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality. His work critiques the amnesiac state encouraged by the Brazilian amnesty law of 1979, which granted blanket pardons to the military government for political crimes committed from 1961 to 1979, including, by implication, the murder, torture, and forced disappearance of thousands of Brazilians. The citizenry was encouraged to forgive and forget the brutalities of military dictatorship, even as the Bolsonaro government seemed to wallow in nostalgia for it.