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Political Row in Brazil Over Dystopian Film ‘Executive Order’

The cast and crew of the film 'Executive Order' present their work before a one-off screening at the Rio film festival on December 15, 2021 Daniel RAMALHO AFP
The cast and crew of the film 'Executive Order' present their work before a one-off screening at the Rio film festival on December 15, 2021 Daniel RAMALHO AFP
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Political Row in Brazil Over Dystopian Film ‘Executive Order’

The cast and crew of the film 'Executive Order' present their work before a one-off screening at the Rio film festival on December 15, 2021 Daniel RAMALHO AFP
The cast and crew of the film 'Executive Order' present their work before a one-off screening at the Rio film festival on December 15, 2021 Daniel RAMALHO AFP

In the Brazil of the near future, the government has found what it calls the answer to righting the wrongs of slavery: send blacks back to Africa.

That dystopian premise is the point of departure for the new film "Executive Order," which is generating controversy in the Brazil of the present over allegations it is being censored by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro's government.

The film, the directorial debut from acclaimed actor Lazaro Ramos ("Madame Sata"), has won praise at a series of international festivals, from Moscow to Memphis.

But it does not yet have a release date in Brazil, where there are mounting accusations against the National Cinema Agency (Ancine) of dragging its feet on green-lighting films deemed uncomfortable for the Bolsonaro administration.

"I can't say whether it's bureaucracy or censorship, but both are barriers to culture," Ramos said when the picture screened at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, which wraps up Sunday -- for now, the only time the movie is scheduled to play in Brazil.

"Executive Order" stars Ramos's wife, Tais Araujo, renowned actor and singer Seu Jorge ("City of God," "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou"), and Anglo-Brazilian star Alred Enoch (the "Harry Potter" franchise, "How to Get Away with Murder").

Araujo and Enoch play Capitu and Antonio, a doctor and lawyer with the trappings of professional success.

Capitu "is a black woman who doesn't really want to talk about racism at first -- she just wants to live," said Araujo.

"But then life comes calling, and she has to dive deep" into the issue.

The "executive order" of the film's title requires all blacks -- or people with "accentuated melanin," in the script's Orwellian language -- to hand themselves in to the authorities to be removed to Africa.

Through Capitu, Antonio and his cousin Andre (Seu Jorge), viewers see how Afro-Brazilians organize a resistance to this mass deportation as the security forces begin arresting people in the streets.

The film is flush with references to structural racism in present-day Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888.

Some authorities in its fictional government also bear strong resemblance to real members of the Bolsonaro administration.

In April, Bolsonaro ally Sergio Camargo, head of the Palmares Cultural Foundation, called for a boycott of the film.

"It's pure victim mentality and a defamatory attack on our president," said Camargo, a black Brazilian who has sparked controversy in the past by saying slavery was "beneficial for Afro-descendants."

It is unclear when Ancine will clear the film for release in Brazil.

The production team says it completed its application for funds to distribute the film in November 2020 and has yet to receive the official response.

Ancine says the application is "under review" and that it is following the "standard procedure."

It is not the first such case to cause controversy, AFP reported.

Directed by "Narcos" star Wagner Moura, the film is a biopic on a leftist guerrilla leader who fought Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-1985).

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, is a fervent admirer of the former military regime, despite its large-scale human-rights abuses.

"Marighella" had its application to Ancine rejected twice in 2019, before finally being cleared for its Brazilian premiere last month.

Shortly after taking office in 2019, Bolsonaro said he wanted to "filter" Brazilian film productions.

"If there's no filter, we're going to get rid of Ancine," he said.

"We're not going to stop debating this issue, or thinking about how this country was built," he said.

"Art is powerful, we can't give that up."

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Entertainment

‘The Brutalist’ Doesn’t Work without Guy Pearce

Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
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‘The Brutalist’ Doesn’t Work without Guy Pearce

Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)
Guy Pearce poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film "The Brutalist" in London, Wednesday, Jan.15, 2025. (AP)

Over the years, Guy Pearce has been good in most all things. But he’s been particularly good at playing characters with a refined disposition who harbor darker impulses underneath.

That was true of his breakout performance in “L.A. Confidential" as a squeaky clean police detective whose ambitions outstrip his ethics. It was true of his dashing upper-class bachelor in “Mildred Pierce.” And it’s most definitely true of his mid-Atlantic tycoon in “The Brutalist.”

“I’m really aware of how precarious we are as human beings,” Pearce says. “Good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things. Moment to moment, we’re trying to just get through the day. We’re trying to be good. And we can do good things for ourselves and other people, but pretty easily we can be tipped off course.”

That sense of duality has served Pearce’s characters well, especially his men of class who turn out to have less of it than they seem. His Harrison Lee Van Buren in “The Brutalist” may be Pearce’s most colossally two-faced concoction yet. If Brady Corbet’s film, which was nominated for 10 Oscars on Thursday, is one of the best films of the year, it’s Pearce’s performance that gives the movie its disquieting shiver.

Pearce’s Van Buren is a recognizable kind of villain: a well-bred aristocrat who, at first, is a benevolent benefactor to Adrien Brody’s architect László Tóth. But what begins as a friendship — Tóth, a Holocaust survivor is nearly destitute when they meet — turns increasingly ugly, as Van Buren’s patronage, warped by jealousy and privilege, turns into a creeping sense of ownership over Tóth. The psychodrama eventually boils over in a grim, climactic scene in which Van Buren pronounces Tóth “just a lady of the night.”

“What was great to discuss with Brady is that he is actually a man of taste,” said Pearce in a recent interview. “He’s a man of class and a man of sophistication. He’s not just a bull in a China shop. He’s not just about greed, taking, taking, taking. It’s probably as much of a curse as anything that he can recognize beauty and he can recognize other people’s artistry.”

For his performance, the 57-year-old Pearce on Thursday landed his first Oscar nomination – a long-in-coming and perhaps overdue honor for the character actor of “Memento,” “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The King’s Speech.” For the Australian-born Pearce, such recognitions are as awkward as they are rewarding. He long ago decided Hollywood stardom wasn’t for him.

“I get uncomfortable with that, to be honest,” he says. “I’m really happy with doing a good performance. I can genuinely say within myself I’ve done a good job. Equally, I know when I’ve done a (bad) job. But I’m also well aware of how a performance can appear good purely because of the tone of the film. I might have done exactly the same performance in another movie with not such a good director, and people might have gone, ‘That was full-on but whatever.’ Whereas in this film, we are all better than we actually are because the film has integrity to it that elevates us all.”

Like F. Murray Abraham’s Saleri in “Amadeus,” Peace’s Van Buren has quickly ascended the ranks of great cinema villains to artists. The character likewise has some basis in reality, albeit extrapolated from a much different time and place. Corbet and Mona Fastvold, who are married and wrote “The Brutalist” together, were fueled by their hardships with financiers on their previous film, 2018's “Vox Lux.”

“We didn’t have a Van Buren but we certainly had our fill of complicated relationships with the people who hold the purse strings,” says Fastvold. “There’s a sense of: I have ownership of the project because I’m paying for it, and I almost have ownership of you.”

Pearce has been around the movie business long enough to shake hands with plenty of wealthy men putting money toward a film production. But he says none of his own experiences went into “The Brutalist.”

“There’s always this slew of producers at a higher level than us who come and visit the set,” Pearce says. “I’m polite and I go, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks.’ But I’m a little caught up with what I’m doing. Then three years later you’ll meet someone who says, ‘You know, I was a producer on “L.A. Confidential.”’ Ah, were you?”

Pearce, who lives in the Netherlands, has generally kept much of Hollywood at arm's length. In conversation, he tends to be chipper and humble — more interested in talking Aussie rules football than the Oscar race. “Any chance to have a kick, I'll have a kick,” he says with smile.

That youthful spirit Pearce tends to apply to his acting as well. Pearce, who started performing in the mid-'80s on the long-running Australian soap opera “Neighbors,” doesn't like to be precious about performing.

“If I’m hanging on to it all day, it’s exhausting,” Pearce says. “The thing that still exists for me is using our imagination, which is kind of a childlike venture. I think there’s something valuable about that even as adults. I think you can be all ages at all times.”

Pearce compares receiving the script from Corbet to “The Brutalist” to when Christopher Nolan approached him 25 years ago. Both times, he went back to watch the director's earlier films and quickly decided this was an opportunity to pounce at.

In digging into Van Buren, Pearce was guided less by real-life experience than the script. The hardest entry way to the character, he says, was the voice. “Thankfully,” Pearce says, “I’m friends with Danny Huston and he’s got a wonderfully old-fashioned voice.” He and Corbet didn't speak much about the director's hardships on “Vox Lux.”

“I know that it was troubled. Brady is going to have trouble on every film he makes, I reckon, because he is such a visionary,” says Pearce. “I know on this there were producers trying to get him to cut the time down. Of course, all those producers now are going, ‘I was with him all the way.’”

To a certain degree, Pearce says, he doesn't fully understand a performance while he's doing it. He's more likely to understand it fully afterward while watching. Take that “lady of the night scene.” While filming, Pearce felt he was saying that line to put Tóth in his place. “But when I watched it, I went: ‘I’m just telling myself. I’m purely telling myself,’” he says. “There’s something even more distasteful about it.”

It's ironic, in a way, that Van Buren, a man bent on control, is played so indelibly by an actor who seeks to impose so little of it, himself.

“There’s a performative element to Van Buren. He exhausts himself because he’s trying to dominate, to be the one in charge, be Mr. Charming,” Pearce says. “I don’t think he can ever enter a room without being self-conscious. That’s an exhausting way to be, I reckon.”