Oscar-nominated actor Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here, 2024) talks to Petra Costa, herself nominated for a feature Doc Academy Award in 2020 for The Edge of Democracy, about the latter’s latest work, Apocalypse in the Tropics, nominated in the Bafta Best Documentary category 2026. The new film examines the role and influence of evangelical Christianity on far-right politics in Brazil, especially during Jair Bolsonaro’s term of office.
In 2025 Bolsonaro was sentenced to 27 years in prison after he was found guilty of orchestrating a coup d’état to overturn the 2022 election results.
Core to Apocalypse in the Tropics is the unprecedented access gained by Costa to the far-right televangelist Silas Malafaia, whose influence over Bolsonaro was considerable.
Costa’s producer and co-writer Alessandra Orofino suggested that they should interview Malafaia, and reached out to Anna Virginia Balloussier, a journalist who had been covering the rise of the Evangelical movement for more than 10 years.
“When we came, we already knew about him. We had seen many [of his] services, so he noticed the respect and the knowledge and gave us access. And we told him that we wanted to film him over time,” Costa tells Torres.
“And the most fascinating thing was that, in the beginning, he was just one of many allies of Bolsonaro… These allies died [or] fought with [Bolsonaro], and Malafaia rose to become the most important and closest ally to him, to the point that he was possibly writing the president’s speeches, as the film material reveals.”
“Some people, when the film came out, here in Brazil especially, said that we overestimated his influence,” Costa continues. “But what was fascinating as well was that, after the film came out, the federal police in Brazil, maybe becauseof the film, even, who knows, decided to add Malafaia to the investigation into the coup plot. And got his phone and leaked some audios between him and Bolsonaro.”
“And in these audios, you see very clearly Malafaia instructing Bolsonaro on how to respond to Trump, how to respond about the tariffs, how to react to Lula [the current president of Brazil], how to record a video… And you see the cowardly character of Bolsonaro and the manipulative character of Malafaia very clearly in that leak.”
Click on the link above to watch the entire conversation between Fernanda Torres and Petra Costa.
