Encantado

A short window of time into the life of a family living in the outskirts of Rio, a subjective, yet precise, political analysis of what happened in the last decade before Bolsonaro rise to presidency.

It is a very interesting subject, Brazil's economic and political development, forwards and backwards, through different types of democratic governments. There is the end of the inflation dragon, privatizations, social inclusion, social programs, excessive polarization, the people discovering the power of the streets. Reelections, impeachment, populists, corruption, World Cup and Olympics hosted in suspicious ways. There are rights and wrongs by everyone who took power and gave hope to Brazilians, using different scopes.

This one is not it. It's a biased vanity and personal effort missing the big picture. Those who like an introspective view, might like it. They will probably end up without.a smart notion of all the nuances Brazil had this century.

We keep hoping that someone without a specific political agenda tries to tackle this interesting scenario.

The film goes back to what happened in contemporary Brazil, from the election of Lula to the rise of Bolsonaro. It's a sensitive and poetic narrative that depicts the lost of a political dream for a generation. With interviews of the former president Dilma Rousseff and other major actors of brazilian political life.

I am yet to watch a documentary about the latest political events in Brazil that provides a balanced perspective on what happened. The director has chosen to 'slice' the reality in a way that matches his own political views. i.e. He simply ignores what does not supports his own beliefs. It is a documentary that represents well the extreme (both right and left) and unbalanced attitudes currently devastating Brazil. The format is not innovative and the slow/melancholic voice-over has already been seen in a similarly unbalanced documentary (The Edge of Democracy).

As a Frenchman who lived for years in Brazil and knowing this country, its people, this film touched me in a special way. I saw many other documentaries about recent Brazilian history. And I didn't saw any one that gives the common and poor anonymous people the same place than political and intellectual mainstream personalities. I saw it in the film especially when the director returns to his homeland, his neighborhood of "Encantado", and captures the devastation, the desolation, the despair of its inhabitants, that tell us their lives. With impressive images (I loved the way protests and projections were filmed), this film carried me in a journey back to the tragic history of Brazil, in a strongly poetic narrative that reminded me Chris Maker's documentaries or Terence Malick's cinema.