Patriots Don’t Die

BR/DE 2020, 10 min

Brazilian Portuguese

synopsis

São Paulo, 15 March 2020: a city in trance. One day before the first confirmed COVID-19-related death in Brazil, supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro take over the streets to deny the gravity of the world pandemic and protest social distancing measures. Could fascism be more contagious than the virus itself?

Patriot’s Don’t Die is an independent production.

review

Critic Giada Sartori from Bologna’s BIRDMEN Magazine wrote the following 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.’ João 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.”

*the number of lives lost in Brazil would eventually surpass 700.000.

director’s statement

Patriot’s Don’t Die is a solastalgic film of sorts. It was shot during my most recent visit to São Paulo – the first time I returned home after the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. The landscape I found this time around was radically different from the one I'd left behind. It was a city in trance. Consumed by never-ending hysteria, it resembled more the deliriously autocratic kingdom of Eldorado – as seen in Glauber Rocha’s prophetic film Entranced Earth (1967) – than it did the hopeful country where I’d once grown up in.

During the most dangerous pandemic to hit the world in over a century, people were taking the streets to show unwavering loyalty to a quasi-mythical figure. From their maskless mouths, they’d express their desire to self-sacrifice in name of an abstract fatherland, an urge to die for an imaginary country where I now seemed to be a foreigner in. Had “my home” taken an irreversibly dark turn? Or was this green-yellow-blue delusion the same country all along?