How Kleber Mendonça Filho Keeps Brazilian Film Alive Under Bolsonaro's Crackdown
Filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho continues to produce politically charged movies despite Jair Bolsonaro's government slashing cinema funding and targeting LGBTQ representation.
When Kleber Mendonça Filho was promoting his genre-blending film Bacurau, Brazil's film industry was reeling from the Bolsonaro government's aggressive budget reductions and project bans. The administration, driven by an anti-LGBTQ stance, attempted to suppress favorable on-screen representation of the community. Mendonça Filho, a former journalist and vocal opponent of Bolsonaro, has persisted in making films that challenge the regime's narrative, often setting them in his hometown of Recife and the wider Northeast region.
His movies revive the Cinema Novo tradition by exposing the area's colonial exploitation, political corruption and class, race, gender and sexuality issues. They also denounce the 1979 amnesty law, which granted blanket pardons to the military regime for crimes committed between 1961 and 1979, encouraging a national forgetting of past atrocities. Despite these pressures, his work demonstrates how Brazilian cinema can survive and critique authoritarian tendencies.
Why it matters
It shows how art can resist authoritarian policies that threaten cultural expression and minority rights.
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