The Brazilian filmmakers, honored this week for the 31st edition of the Biarritz Latin America Festival, hope that the first round of the presidential election next Sunday will allow
the Bolsonaro period
to "finally stop" .
For the bicentenary of the South American giant, which won its independence from Portugal in 1822, the festival has chosen to give carte blanche to Kléber Mendonça Filho (53), who has won several awards at Cannes.
The native of Recife, in the northeast of the country, crowned in 2019 with the Jury Prize for his film
Bacurau
, presents in Biarritz
"all the asymmetry of Brazil"
,
"its beauty, its ugliness, its confusion"
through 10 feature films and 14 short films.
Without forgetting
“his political violence”
, translated by
“normalized intolerance”
since the coming to power, in 2018, of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, he believes.
"A million firearms have been legalized and each citizen can have up to seven guns in his home,"
chokes the filmmaker.
In July, a local representative of the Workers' Party (PT) of former president and candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was shot and killed by a pro-Bolsonaro policeman.
At the beginning of September, a supporter of the Brazilian president killed a supporter of Lula with fifteen blows of an ax during a political dispute.
“Today there is a fear of using symbols or displaying effigies”
, points out Kléber Mendonça Filho, very critical of a Bolsonaro whose
“great work will have been to normalize stupidity”
.
His victory is
"impossible"
, refuses to believe the director.
“Country of an undesirable future”
The latest Brazilian polls credit Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva with 47% of voting intentions, against 33% for Jair Bolsonaro.
"The current president's supporters are in a parallel dimension and I hope that with his defeat a certain sense of reality will return
," continues the director of
Aquarius
.
Will these people wake up or go into an even deeper cave?”
Director Filipe Galvon, invited to Biarritz for his latest short film
Next Year in Tulle
, fears
"a new disillusion"
.
Even if Lula won, the forty-year-old
“cannot see how we are going to get out of Bolsonarism”
, marked by the advent of an
“alternative truth”
and an
“industrialized conspiracy”
.
For him, his country, far from being an
“exotic”
elsewhere ,
“always gives a saturated glimpse of what can happen in a Western democracy”
.
In his short film, this Brazilian, living in France since 2013, illustrates a
"sensation of deja vu"
experienced in 2018, when he was on the Champs-Élysées in Paris during a mobilization of yellow vests.
"It was very similar to the 2013 protests in Brazil, which started over the rising cost of transportation
," before spreading to the high cost of living.
Expatriate, Filipe Galvon does not envisage a return to his native country, this Brazil which
“would be the country of an undesirable future”
, for which
“we must mourn”
.
“I wish a victory for Lula, she leads me to vote without any hesitation, but I fear that it is just a breath to prepare for the fight of the years to come”
, he continues.
And, concludes Kléber Mendonça Filho: “We will have to rebuild what Brazilian morality and citizenship are.”
