EXCLUSIVE: In our times of diminishing box office receipts, there is, ironically, no greater demonstration of cinema’s enduring power than in the actions of those who try to destroy it.
Take Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right president, who, on his first day in office after a long campaign focused on defence, crime, and financial deregulation, moved to disband the Ministry of Culture, folding the department into an authoritarian, so-called Ministry of Citizenship. What followed were sustained attacks on the country’s cultural field, with a particular focus on cinema. Cash was pulled from national cinema organizations and censors were placed on publicly funded projects, crippling film culture in the nation.
“We found a wasteland of investments,” Margareth Menezes tells us of the country’s film industry at the time. Menezes — a legend of Brazil’s music industry, often described as the queen of Brazilian Afropop — was appointed as the
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