Official competition

Behind closed doors

João Pedro Bim

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

Information

Country

Brazil

Year

2023

Length

66'

Category

Documentary

Origin of archival materials

Brazilian National Archive (1964 – 1980), with the exception of the AI-5 meeting recording, found in the house of a Brazilian army officer.

Screenplay

João Pedro Bim

Editing

Bruna Carvalho Almeida

Production

Matheus Rufino

Director’s biography

João Pedro Bim is a film producer and researcher from São Paulo, Brazil. Partner of the production company A Flor e a Náusea, he produced the documentary series Social Housing – Projects of Brazil (2019), the multi-awarded short films Liberty (2018) and Still Agony (2018) and the feature Panorama (2021), as was associate producer of the commercially-distributed feature The Young Baumann (2018). He also works as an archival footage researcher in documentary features and series. In 2023, Bim debuts as a director with the documentary feature Behind Closed Doors.