XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

The fall of Dilma Rousseeff and contemporary Brazilian cinema

• In Event: The Economics and Politics of Contemporary Brazilian Cinema

Abstract

The dismissal of Dilma Rousseff continues to generate lively controversies. This helps to explain why documentaries have been made about it: until now, at least fourteen feature films are mainly dedicated to it. The “excess” of these films can only be understood within the contemporary context of Brazilian audiovisual production — in which the incentive and regulation laws of the exhibition space on televisions play an important role, in addition to the lowering of production costs with the advent and audiovisual dissemination. But other factors can also be listed as decisive: (1) the intrinsic narrativity of this traumatic event (one could or could not know its outcome, but one knew in advance what the “plot” would be); (2) a reaction against the anti-feminist backlash that manifested itself in the campaigns against Dilma (for comparison purposes, less than 15% of the films produced in 2015 were directed by women; in the case of documentaries dedicated to the coup, the proportion is 40%) ; (3) the growing role of social networks as an arena for debate or, at least, for expressing opinions to try to influence the perception of others regarding the meaning of events. The purpose of this communication is to address the causes of this unprecedented phenomenon in the history of documentary cinema - never before have so many films been made on the same subject in such a short period - and the aesthetic and narrative influence that such works can have on each other.

Author

• Daniel Leão, UFSC