A new doc­u­men­tary reveals the ugly truth of mod­ern politics

Maria Augus­ta Ramos’ doc­u­men­tary, The Tri­al (O Proces­so), opens as two large crowds cheer on oppos­ing sides of the 2016 impeach­ment vote of for­mer Brazil­ian Pres­i­dent, Dil­ma Roussef. Dressed in Brazil’s colours, cit­i­zens watch as elect­ed offi­cials cast their votes, cheer­ing and jeer­ing like it’s a World Cup qual­i­fy­ing match. Invok­ing God, jus­tice and his­to­ry, the Yes vote suc­ceeds in push­ing Roussef into the first stage of impeach­ment. Among the Yes vot­ers is the cur­rent pres­i­dent-elect, Jair Bol­sonaro, who ded­i­cat­ed his vote to ​“to the mem­o­ry of Colonel Car­los Alber­to Bril­hante Ustra,” who was the first mil­i­tary offi­cial to be recog­nised as a tor­tur­er dur­ing the 1964 – 1985 mil­i­tary dictatorship.

The Tri­al takes off in this chaos. It is an obser­va­tion­al doc­u­men­tary com­prised of behind-the-scenes footage of the Roussef legal team and the Brazil­ian Sen­ate offi­cial cable chan­nel, a trawl through the mis­takes and mis­truths of a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern polit­i­cal scan­dal. The doc­u­men­tary doesn’t shed light on the treach­er­ous polit­i­cal land­scape of Brazil as much as it reflects a greater polit­i­cal trend of frag­ment­ed and unsta­ble realities.

The film is struc­tured like a pro­ce­dur­al dra­ma. The non-stop buzzing of most­ly unchecked noti­fi­ca­tions cre­ates an audi­to­ry back­drop of unease, rais­ing the already anx­ious cir­cum­stances to new heights. Arti­fice takes a sim­i­lar­ly cen­tral stage as we see lawyers drift in and out of per­sonas, invok­ing injus­tice in tears, only to pull it back togeth­er once the cam­era pulls away. Ramos, who has pre­vi­ous­ly made sev­er­al doc­u­men­taries about the Brazil­ian jus­tice sys­tem, invokes the ​“the­atre of jus­tice,” in dis­cussing her films at a recent Mas­ter Class at the RIDM fes­ti­val in Montréal.

Ramos, who men­tions the tra­di­tions of Dutch doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing as a major influ­ence, sim­i­lar­ly draws on the works some of the great Dutch painters. There’s the casu­al grandeur of Rem­brandt, the focused order of Ver­meer and the chaot­ic lines of Van Gogh in her work. The film, which shifts from Baroque to mod­ernist, takes into account envi­ron­men­tal and casu­al details in its fram­ing. As well as cap­tur­ing the grand ges­tures of the events, there are sev­er­al sub­tle shifts in focus, such as onto a sub­ject bit­ing her lip, and the sym­bol­ic white tow­ers of the The Nation­al Con­gress of Brazil. The unique­ly struc­tured and func­tion­al ele­ments of the Con­gress build­ing, in par­tic­u­lar, serve as a pla­ton­ic ide­al of polit­i­cal thought in stark con­trast to the chaos that lies within.

Ramos is fas­ci­nat­ed by, ​“What keeps the poor poor and the con­se­quences of inequal­i­ty,” and how the vio­lence with­in that soci­ety is also, ​“Per­pet­u­at­ed through the jus­tice sys­tem.” In one of her pre­vi­ous films, Behave, she exam­ined cas­es in the juve­nile courts. In Brazil, it is ille­gal to show the faces and reveal the iden­ti­ties of youth offend­ers. A law set up to pro­tect young peo­ple had the oppo­site effect and result­ed in a media fren­zy that sought to fur­ther demonise young peo­ple, in par­tic­u­lar from poor neigh­bour­hoods and the favelas.

In The Tri­al, she coun­ters the anonymi­ty of these sto­ries by cast­ing actors to read out the tes­ti­mo­ny of these cas­es, inter­cut­ting them with real footage of the judges, lawyers and par­ents in the room. The effect is near-seam­less and has a pow­er­ful effect in coun­ter­act­ing tabloid media pro­pa­gan­da. Her film­mak­ing, though depict­ing flawed and often cru­el ele­ments of the jus­tice sys­tem, paint bro­ken insti­tu­tions rather than indi­vid­ual fail­ures. ​“I like peo­ple, or I wouldn’t make movies,” she explains. Through the fram­ing of fic­tion, cin­e­ma is able to trans­late the real cir­cum­stances of these youth offend­ers bet­ter than real­i­ty itself.

The fram­ing of real­i­ty is as inte­gral to Ramos’ film­mak­ing as it is soci­ety itself. Absur­di­ty rules in the court­room to the point where sub­jects invoke Franz Kafka’s ​‘The Tri­al’. More than just a dis­cus­sion of what hap­pened and who is telling the truth, the tri­al and its sur­round­ings are rife with irrel­e­vant noise that only fur­ther mud­dies the waters of real­i­ty. The more you watch, the less cer­tain you are of what is actu­al­ly going on and this becomes a per­fect artic­u­la­tion for the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate around the world.

The Tri­al is hor­ri­fy­ing­ly pre­scient. It is a film about pow­er, cor­rup­tion and real­i­ty, one that cap­tures the atmos­phere of unease and chaos that seems to dom­i­nate our ²⁴⁄₇ news cycle. Ramos doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly point towards a solu­tion as much as hold a mir­ror up to how things are. Exas­per­at­ed and almost hope­less, the film asks how do we pull our­selves out of the noise of mis­in­for­ma­tion to rec­on­cile ideals of jus­tice and fairness?