Cinema and Politics in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

One of the richest yet insufficiently analysed aspects in Brazilian cinema today is the resurgence of politics as a key issue in many aesthetically relevant films which, at the same time, contribute to the broadening of the country’s political debate. Unlike what can imagine the inattentive viewer, Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2016) is not an isolated case, although it is certainly the most significant. For various reasons: for its great quality, for what it proposes to discuss, and also because the moment of its release coincided with the strong political crisis characterized by the rise of the illegitimate government of Michel Temer. As I see it, good news in such difficult times are the fact that some directors be willing to discuss political issues in many different ways. It appears that after the omnipresence of politics in the Brazilian auteur cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the films of directors connected to the "Cinema Novo" [New Cinema] and the "Cinema Marginal" [Marginal Cinema], there has been a search for other topics from the mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s, with policy being seen as something minor and, at best, as a background.