The Edge of Democracy(2019)
dir. Petra Costa
A filmmaker watches her democracy come apart.
Where to watch: Streaming on NetflixLetterboxd ↗
A Brazilian filmmaker narrates the unraveling of her country's democracy from the inside. Petra Costa follows the rise of Lula and the Workers' Party, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, Lula's imprisonment and the election of Jair Bolsonaro, with rare access to the people at the center, and weaves in her own family's ties to Brazil's elite and to the resistance against the dictatorship.
Why it’s here
The punk move is the point of view: Costa doesn't pretend to stand outside the story. She narrates in the first person, as a daughter of dissidents and of a family that built its wealth in the system she is questioning, and says plainly that she is grieving. The pedagogy is in how it shows democracy failing slowly instead of in one coup: courts, media, markets and elites each making a reasonable-sounding move until the ground has shifted. That makes it a useful film for anyone trying to recognize the pattern in their own country. It takes a side, and critics have pointed out it is generous to the Workers' Party and thin on the economics and on that party's own corruption, so watch it as one informed witness's account rather than the neutral record.
Where This Film Lives
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
Theatre of the Oppressed
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Theatre as rehearsal for revolution. He was tortured for this.
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Tropical Truth
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Arrested for electric guitar. The exile is the point.
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Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right
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The fringe that ate the Republican Party.
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Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It
Samuel Moyn
Not a generation gap. An extraction system.
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How Democracies Die
Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt
Democracies don't die by coup anymore. Here's how they actually end.
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A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James
The night someone tried to kill Bob Marley.
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A Fever in the Heartland
Timothy Egan
The KKK had millions of members in the 1920s. In the Midwest.
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A Man of the People
Chinua Achebe
Nigerian farce. Written the year before the coup.
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