Netflix has been on the biggest and best streaming services in the world for a long while now, but there have nonetheless still been some critics who’ve pointed out a slight gap in its repertoire. While the streamer excels in short documentary series on slightly less momentous topics like disastrous festivals and true crime, it hasn’t made many really important documentaries.
That might be about to change, though, with the arrival of Apocalypse in the Tropics, a long-awaited and extremely hyped documentary about the rise of nationalism and evangelical religion in Brazil over the last decade and more. It promises to tell the story that we all witnessed play out in a way that should be a little easier to understand.
The documentary aims to shine a light on how evangelical Christian leaders have changed from bit-part players in Brazilian politics into huge titans of power, who have the capability and the will to influence the votes and beliefs of their often massive congregations.
It’s a change that has happened in a very short period of time, and one that is fairly straightforward to link to the rise of right-wing figures like the now-disgraced Jair Bolsonaro, who was president of the country between 2019 and 2023, and whose term ended in the debacle of an attempted coup to deny the election results.
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If that sounds familiar, it should – many observers have made the obvious comparison between what happened in Brazil in 2020 and the chaotic end of Donald Trump’s first term as US president. There are a range of other parallels, and this will doubtless be a fascinating watch.
More to the point, it arrives with a wild amount of hype, having featured at a whole heap of film festivals by this point, winning awards at a handful of them, too. That means this could be the sort of hard-hitting material that Netflix sometimes lacks, when it arrives on 14 July.
