A new film argues that Brazil teeters on the brink of authoritarianism. It's true

It is not often that a two-hour, Portuguese-language documentary about Brazilian politics, directed by a Brazilian film-maker, is nominated for an Oscar. But on Monday, the Academy-nominated Petra Costa’s Netflix film The Edge of Democracy – not as a foreign film, but as a contender for the more mainstream title of Best Documentary of 2019.

As its title suggests, the film is a warning about the multiple threats posed to democratic values and institutions in the world’s sixth most populous country. That Brazilian democracy is imperiled by the 2018 election of the far-right, dictatorship-supporting former army captain Jair Bolsonaro has been much discussed in the international press.

Related: Brazil has become a cautionary tale for the world's democracies | Petra Costa

But Costa’s film makes clear that Bolsonaro did not materialize from nowhere. As is true of the US election of Donald Trump and the UK’s ratification of Brexit, the conditions that nurtured that traumatic and disruptive event were years in the making. Indeed, The Edge of Democracy devotes only a few minutes near the end to Bolsonaro’s rise, implicitly depicting it as the consequence of the events that preceded it and that compose the bulk of the film.

The film focuses on two pre-Bolsonaro events: the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the 2017 corruption conviction, and ultimate imprisonment, of Rousseff’s party compatriot, Lula da Silva, when Lula was leading all polls by a substantial margin for the 2018 presidential race. Both Rousseff and Lula are members of the center-left Workers’ party (PT).

Bolsonaro’s path to power was paved by the imprisonment of Lula and subsequent barring of him from the 2018 race – a result secured by a dubious probe, nicknamed Car Wash, by then judge Sérgio Moro. After Bolsonaro’s win, Moro – in a transaction which even many of his longtime supporters viewed as having the stench of a quid pro quo – was rewarded by Bolsonaro with a huge promotion, from low-level judge in the mid-sized city of Curitiba to the all-powerful minister of justice and public security.

Since then, a massive leaked archive of secret conversations (reported by the Intercept) has revealed serious wrongdoing by Moro and the anti-corruption prosecutors he led. The revelations may have contributed to the Brazilian supreme court’s decision to free Lula from prison in November last year. (Disclosure: my husband, Glenn Greenwald, is a co-founder of the Intercept and the journalist who received that archive.)

Costa’s film suggests that the reputed corruption and authoritarian tendencies of Bolsonaro and the Brazilian far right were visible long before the Intercept showed the definitive proof to the world.

The documentary, while featuring remarkable footage of historic value showing Rousseff and Lula during their moments of crisis, does not purport to be a cold, clinical and neutral recounting. Costa has a strong point of view and narrative perspective.

The film argues, and documents with ample evidence, that the destruction of PT’s leaders was not really driven by the anti-corruption fervor invoked to justify it. Combating corruption was the pretext, not the cause.

Notwithstanding the genuine corruption that plagued Lula and Rousseff’s party – corruption which even Lula has acknowledged – the Car Wash corruption inquiry was itself corrupt. It was a stealth rightwing political operation that weaponized the law rather than upheld it, all in the service of achieving what the Brazilian right has tried but failed to accomplish at the ballot box since 2002: removing PT from power and destroying the party.

In other words, the dominant force in Brazilian politics for the last five years was not elections and politics – where PT has always thrived – but legal and judicial power used for obviously politicized ends. When leaders are determined not by popular vote or electioneering but by unelected judges with a clear political ideology, then democracy exists in name only.

Beyond the political events which Costa’s film so powerfully covers, her Oscar nomination is itself an important development in Brazilian democracy. It comes at a time when not only press freedoms and democratic values are under assault in Brazil, but also artistic expression.

Late last week, Bolsonaro was forced to fire his Culture Minister, Ricardo Alvim, after Alvim, among other stunning offenses, plagiarized the words of Joseph Goebbels. Alvim’s 6-minute speech, viewable with English subtitles, has to be seen to be believed: it channels Nazi themes with shocking deliberateness and thoroughness.

Last month, a member of the far-right party PSL, armed with a molotov cocktail, attacked the production company, Porta dos Fundos, that produced a controversial Netflix film depicting Jesus as gay. (Bolsonaro was a member of PSL, but left in November due to internal disagreements.) The alleged attacker, Eduardo Fauzi, fled Brazil to Russia, where he is currently seeking asylum.

Recently a far-right judge with sympathies to Bolsonaro issued a shocking ruling that ordered Netflix to remove the film from its streaming platform and barred it from ever showing it again. Though the Brazilian supreme court overturned the order, these multipronged attacks on the film underscore the systemic hostility which film-makers and artists are encountering.

Threats of violence prevented one of Brazil’s most famous and admired actors – Wagner Moura, of Narcos fame – from showing his 2019 film about the leftist guerrilla Carlos Marighella in cinemas. Throughout 2019, other artists, journalists and writers have had to cancel scheduled public events due to threats of violence from the far right, or have encountered violence when they appeared.

When asked on Monday about the Oscar nomination for The Edge of Democracy, Bolsonaro denounced the film as “fiction” and leftist propaganda. When a reporter asked where he had viewed the film, Bolsonaro acknowledged that he has never seen it, saying he had “no time” to watch films of this sort.

For the president of Brazil to harshly denounce an Oscar-nominated Brazilian film which he has not seen, though perhaps trivial in the scheme of the threats he poses, is illustrative of the mentality and ideology that now rules our country.

Films and plays that offend far-right sentiment are subject to violence and censorship. Center-left parties that win elections are destroyed by rightwing judges who then join the government they helped elect. Truly Brazil tinkers on the edge of democracy.

• David Miranda is a member of the Brazilian congress for the Socialism and Liberty party and a Guardian US columnist