PATRIOTS DON’T DIE is making its Italian premiere at the 2020 edition of Ce l’ho Corto Film Festival in Bologna. The event, which is hosted and organized by the local cinema Kinodromo, is taking place entirely online this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The festival aims to give visibility to young authors of the independent audiovisual scene with a focus on short format, especially those without professional distribution.
João also took part in a virtual panel with Maddalena Bianchi and Yorgos Kostianis from the Ce l’ho Corto team. During the conversation, he answered a few questions about his short film and on Brazil’s current political climate ahead of the 2020 municipal elections. Here’s a snippet:
Last but not least, critic Giada Sartori from Bologna’s BIRDMEN Magazine wrote the following words about the film: “João Pedro Prado looks at the present global pandemic and how, despite the evidence, some continue to deny the seriousness of the situation. He does so by showing a symbolic day for Brazil, his home country: March 15. If that day in 1985 saw the end of the Brazilian military government, in 2020 the streets of São Paulo are filled with deniers who, waving flags and banners, protest against the ‘virus of corruption’ or ‘communism,’ as some define it in the course of the short film. ‘We are patriots, not idiots’: this is their war cry, and as the title chosen by Prado says ironically, ‘patriots don't die.’”
“The point of view of the protesters is that of President Jair Bolsonaro, who has often downplayed the pandemic with statements such as ‘There’s nothing I can do, I'm sorry for the dead but we will all die one day.’ Joāo represents the circus of lies that occupies the streets of his city without mercy, moving from one individual to another like a silent fly. The question that the director seems to ask himself with PATRIOTS DON’T DIE is whether the deadliest virus of all is not fascism. To the contradictory and deleterious ideas of the deniers, he opposes the evidence with the final billboard: from March 15 to October 1, 143,000 Brazilians died from the virus.”