December 13th, 1968. The Brazilian Dictatorship summons its Security Council to enact Institutional Act Nº 5, marking the beginning of the dictatorship’s most violent period. The meeting was recorded but remained secret for decades. The documentary combines these audio recordings with propaganda films from the era.
«The film is the result of a search for understanding the historical roots of the monster we discovered sleeping under our beds. We made the film at a time when the dictatorship’s rhetoric alarmingly resurfaced during Jair Bolsonaro’s government. As a method, we interrogated the documents, scouring them for the foundation of the state of affairs that has led us here. In this movement, we sought to explore the Brazilian dictatorship’s propaganda as a case study on authoritarian discourse in its cinematic form.»
— João Pedro Bim
