Essay: As American democracy is in peril, Brazilian films offer perspective

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

When Brazilian journalist Tatiana Merlino watched “The Secret Agent” — one of this year’s Oscar nominees for best picture — it felt like seeing scattered scenes from her own life.As the movie follows Marcelo (played by Wagner Moura) — a professor fleeing from a vindictive businessman during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985), the story skims through old audio tapes and newspapers, reviewed by a researcher looking into how he died.Like her, Merlino also dug into the past to piece together how her uncle, Luiz Eduardo Merlino, a communist activist, was killed by the right-wing regime in 1971.

Though it was initially reported as a suicide, the family soon found his corpse with torture marks in a morgue.“It became necessary to fight for memory, truth, and justice, because these crimes committed by dictatorship agents weren’t punished at that time, and have not been to this day,” says the 49-year-old journalist, who first saw “The Secret Agent” in São Paulo, and made a career from investigating human rights abuses.“When a country does not come to terms with its past,” she adds, “its ghosts resurface.”Recent dictatorship-themed movies like “The Secret Agent” and “I’m Still Here,” which won the Oscar for best international film in 2025, were instant blockbusters back home in Brazil.While both films honor those who, like Merlino, still seek justice for the regime victims, their popularity also got boosted by the country’s zeitgeist.

To many Brazilians, these movies served as reminders of what could have been had former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, himself a retired Army captain and a dictatorship nostalgic, succeeded in his 2022 attempt at a coup d’etat.On Jan.8, 2023, encouraged by Bolsonaro, hundreds of vandals stormed into the Three Powers Plaza, a square in the country’s capital, Brasília, that gathers the congress, t...