Born on July 8th, 1983, Petra Costa is now firmly established as the most commercially and critically acclaimed documentarist in the history of Brazilian cinema. Her 2018 movie The Edge of Democracy received a Best Documentary Oscar nomination, the first ever such recognition in the history of the country. This achievement triggered an uproar in Brazil, which has had a profound effect on both the country and the filmmaker. The film investigates Petra’s inexorable connection to the turbulent history of Brazil (also my home nation). Petra’s 2012’s film Elena (2012; pictured below) explores her younger sister’s suicide at the age of just 20 and the repercussions of the tragedy on Petra and her family (the two siblings are picture above).

The autobiographical documentarist is intimately and inextricably connected to her films. In these two films, she has established that the self is inseparable from the political establishment, inextricable from the family, and highly vulnerable.

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The vulnerable young woman

Costa opens Elena with the following voiceover, delivered by the filmmaker herself: “Elena, I dreamt of you last night. You were soft, you walked the streets of New York with a silk shirt. I try to get close to you, touch you, smell you, but when I see you you’re on the top of a wall, stuck in a mesh of electric wires. I look again and I realise that it’s me on top of the wall. I try to touch the wires, and I fall from the very tall wall. And I die”. Petra Costa’s face is faintly visible in what seems to be a car window driving around New York at night.

We soon learn that the Brazilian filmmaker – then in her late 20s – traveled to New York in search of her sister. At first, audiences are not told that Elena committed suicide. The death to which Costa alludes in her narration sounds like a metaphorical one (perhaps the death of the filmmaker?).

Goldsmiths University Professor Tony Dowmunt wrote in ‘Autobiographical documentary—the ‘seer’ and the seen’: “In a way that written autobiography can easily avoid, autobiographical filmmaking necessarily confronts the author/narrator, both with him/herself and with her/his ‘others’ (friends, family and any other characters in the films). My argument is that these confrontations invariably lead to a reflexive quality manifested in the films” This confrontation is particularly pronounced in Elena. Not only the director had to confront ghosts of the past, but she also had to purge and “to kill” them. Hence the death reference (“and I die”) in the opening sequence. “To kill” means to accept the irreversibility of loss. The reflexive quality (to which Dowmunt alludes) of Elena helps Petra to come to the liberating realisation that she is now free to move forward. The film becomes a transformational tool, an instrument for personal liberation. Costa can only become a fully-fledged adult and professional once she has come to terms with the tragic death of her sister almost two decades earlier. Perhaps not coincidentally, Elena is the film that first catapulted Costa to fame, establishing her as a documentarist recognised.

Elena’s memories are recorded in audio because she hated her handwriting. Such audio diaries is played out several times in the film. Elena and Petra’s voices are very similar: sad and laborious, as if choking with anguish and pain. Both women speak in their native tongue Portuguese. The filmmaker did not record an English version of the voiceover (unlike in The Edge of Democracy, where an audio version is available in the two languages, both narrated by the filmmaker). The outcome is that the two sisters morph into one single being, dreamy and despondent, searching for an elusive something on the streets of New York.

Edward Sidenstiucker wrote: “What I can say is that too frequent quotation from the diary gives the autobiography a scrappy, diffuse quality. It comes to look more like a miscellany than a narrative”. Such is the case with Elena. The frequent quotations from Elena’s oral diary coupled with Petra’s diary-like delivery (she narrates her events in New York as if she had written them down on a piece of paper) give the film a fragmented and wordy feel. This is intentional. This kaleidoscope of diary quotations is blended with blurry, distorted and gently tremulous imagery (probably captured with an unusually high or unusually low shutter speed) in order to give Elena a lyrical touch. This poetical gaze is tender, humane and deeply feminine.

We eventually learn that Elena committed suicide in New York at the tender age of just 20, shortly after arriving in the city while chasing her dream of becoming a film star. Her sister was 13 years her junior, aged just seven. Both Petra and her mother Marília Andrade were left in Brazil struggling to cope with the death for many years, even decades to come. Petra tells the late Elena: “you and I inherited the dream of making cinema from our mother. She dreamt of being an actress, kissing Frank Sinatra and therefore being a woman”. This powerful assertion reinforces the connection between the three women. They are connected through art and also through their dreams.

Petra traveled to the city that never sleeps in search of her sister. Her filmic search turned her into a film star: Petra Costa becomes the protagonist of a successful documentary. There is a vicarious sense of accomplishment. She fulfilled the mission that her sister started out. The only difference is that she did so in documentary instead of fiction form.

Michel Foucault famously wrote: “The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement” (‘The Will to Knowledge: the History of Sexuality’). Petra Costa doubles down on Foucault: she confesses on behalf of herself and also on behalf of her sister. Costa’s oeuvre is hyper- confessional.

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Strength through confession

The filmmaker becomes stronger by exposing her innermost fears and vulnerabilities. This is both in the emotional sense (as repeatedly narrated by Petra and her sister); and also the medical sense (Petra both shows and reads out the medical notes on Elena’s suicide as well as on her own mental health collapse following her sister death). The coroner’s notes state that Elena died due to “acute intoxication”, while listing several drugs. Petra tells us that – following her sister’s death – she suffered from depression, obsessive compulsive behaviour and that her mother was terrified that she too would commit suicide. Marília only accepted that her surviving daughter would not kill herself once Petra reached her 20th birthday (the age in which Elena committed suicide). The completion of Elena is yet further evidence of Petra’s desire to work and to live. Her work as a filmmaker has given her impetus to carry on. The brutal honesty of the once fragile little girl has turned her into an empowered grown-up woman, and a competent professional on her own merit.

Elena is a very carnal movie. It is so vivid with colours and poetry that it is almost a sentient creature. It is also a sensory experience: a film so personal and immersive that viewers can almost feel what it is like to be in the filmmaker’s skin. Petra has fully leveraged the artifices of documentary-making in order to present viewers with a real and palpable version of herself.

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The political woman

Costa’s most successful film to date is also a highly autobiographical one, something which she sets out from the very start: “Brazilian democracy and I have almost the same age. And I thought that in our 30s we both would be standing on solid ground”. The contrast is evident: while Petra is a strong woman standing firmly on her feet, Brazilian democracy is facing a near-collapse and potential death. This is following the parliamentary coup d’etat that removed president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 (pictured below, in a still from The Edge of Democracy), the political imprisonment of former president Lula in 2018 (who was ahead in all presidential polls) and the consequent election of dictatorship-supporting and torture-loving Jair Bolsonaro.

Similarly to Elena, The Edge of Democracy is a film populated with resolute female characters. Some succeed, some fail. Elena fell, and so did Dilma. Petra and her mother (Marília is present in both films) have succeeded. Both “winners” attended the Oscar ceremony. There was speculation that Dilma too would walk the red carpet, however she decided against it. The only female character whose near future is grave peril is Brazilian democracy. Incidentally, Dilma is the only female president in Brazilian history.

Brazil’s 35th president Dilma personifies Brazilian democracy. She details her predicament, while comparing Brazilian democracy to a human being: “Twice, I saw up close the face of death, when I was tortured for successive day, subjected to abuse that made us doubt the meaning of humanity and life itself. And when a serious, extremely painful [a lymphoma in 2011] illness could’ve shortened my life. Now I only fear the death of democracy”.

Despite never alluding to her sister’s suicide in her 2018 film, it is crystal-clear that the filmmaker has a familial relationship with Brazil’s democracy. Petra Costa has two sisters: Elena and Democracy. Not coincidentally, the Portuguese word for democracy (“democracia”) is feminine.

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The family connection

The triptych of women (Petra, Elena and Marilia) established in Elena is extended in The Edge of Democracy in order include two further female characters: Dilma and Brazilian democracy.

The sorority is prevalent. These women all have fought arduous battles and they all have suffered. The age comparison (between Petra and democracy) is a particularly powerful one. Brazilian democracy is Petra’s middle sister. Presumably, it would be extremely painful for the Brazilian filmmaker to lose yet another sibling at such young age. Fortunately, Brazilian democracy did not have the same fate as Elena. It did survive, even if it is still plagued with a grave disease (which she details in her 2024 film Apocalypse in the Tropics, a film structurally similar to The Edge of Democracy, however far less autobiographical, and perhaps for that reason – among others – a piece of filmmaking not as robust as the two films discussed here).

Marília and Dilma are the motherly figures. The woman who governed Brazil between 2011 and 2016 is often called “Dilmãe” (a portmanteau of “Dilma” and “mãe”, the Portuguese word for “mother”). Both women were guerrilla-fighters during the dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985, both were born in the state of Minas Gerais and they were held in the same prison. At one point, Petra introduces her mother to Dilma. The two women talk enthusiastically about the struggles of the past, while Dilma also reminisces about politics and philosophy. Marília is a stand-in for Petra (who is behind the camera), while Dilma is a proxy for democracy. Women and politics are fused. It becomes impossible to separate the history of Petra’s family from the history of Brazil.

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One man

There is however one male that is central to Petra’s journey. That’s neither her father Manoel Costa Junior nor her partner. Brazilian president Lula (then in prison, and now on his third presidential term; pictured below also in a still from The Edge of Democracy) is the most important character of The Edge of Democracy. The film starts and ends with thousands of Brazilians sieging a trade union building in São Bernardo do Campo in order to protect Lula from his imminent arrest. Lula eventually hands himself in in order to avoid a major bloodshed. Lula embodies the Brazilian left and the Brazil “that worked out”. Petra explains that Lula catapulted the country from 13th to 6th world economy while also lifting 30 million people out of poverty during his eight years in power. Lula is fulfilling the dream of her mother, who first read Marx in an American bookshop and almost joined the Araguaia guerrillas (armed struggle against the Brazilian dictatorship) in the late 1960s (something Petra explains in Elena). While Lula and Manoel have never met, the parallels are there to see. Once again, the history of Petra’s family is inextricable from her country’s.

The questionable legality of the proceedings that characterised the impeachment/ parliamentary coup d’etat that removed Dilma in 2016 and the extensive lawfare (weaponisation of the judicial system) campaign that culminated in the imprisonment of Lula in 2018 are vital to Petra’s argument that Brazilian democracy is not standing on “solid ground”. There is no democracy without the rule of law. Petra clarifies that Dilma was removed from office without committing any impeachable offense, but instead on a widespread budgeting technicality. She also reveals that Lula was persecuted (instead of prosecuted) on trumped up charges regarding a seaside apartment. An MP explains to Petra that Dilma was removed because she did not get on with Congress: “ She never kissed or hugged anyone”. The filmmaker cleverly retorts: “so she was impeached because she didn’t hug people?”.

Petra explains the perverse nature of the lawfare campaign against Lula. The lack of evidence was used as evidence that Lula was guilty. The Kafka-esque rationale is that Lula was so guilty that he managed to conceal all evidence against him. A presumption of guilt emanates from the Brazilian judiciary, thereby subverting one of the foundations of justice: the presumption of innocence.

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A woman’s body

The integrity of Brazilian law is tantamount to the physical integrity of a woman. Brazilian law has been violated in a way that Petra has never experienced in her body. However, because the filmmaker personifies democracy and claims affiliation with it, Petra feels the pain that she (the democracy) is suffering.

While not the main focus of the film, there are also clues in Elena that the filmmaker is inseparable from her family and their politics. Elena tells during a job interview: “My mother is a journalist and sociologist, my father is a politician”. We soon learn that Marilia and Manoel were communists, and that it was the pregnancy with Elena that prevented them from joining the Araguaia guerrilas and likely being murdered. They lived in hiding during the most oppressive years of the Brazilian dictatorship.

Petra goes even further at fusing her country’s with her family’s history. She reveals that her grandfather founded one of the country’s leading construction companies: Andrade Gutierrez, and that many of her relatives veered to the right, supporting the 2016 coup. The filmmaker discloses her blood connections to spurious characters. They include Aécio Neves (the defeated presidential candidate in 2014, and one of the masterminds of the 2016 coup). She explains: “We are a republic of families. Some control the media. Some control the banks. They own the sand, the rock, the iron. And also often it happens that they get tired of democracy, of the rule of law”. This confession reveals that her family is fallible and even complicit with the demise of Brazilian democracy. Once again, brutal honesty prevails.

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A different type of autobiography

Petra is not a classical autobiographist. Literary critic. Elizabeth Bruss famously wrote: “The unity of subjectivity and subject matter – the implied identity of author, narrator and protagonist on which classical autobiography depends – seems to be shattered by film; the autobiographical self de-composes, schisms, into almost mutually exclusive elements of the person filmed (entirely visible, recorded and projected) and the person filming (entirely hidden, behind the camera eye)”.

Petra often blurs the “schism’ to which Bruss refers by alternating behind and in front of the camera. At times, she is entirely visible (for example: when searching for her sister on the streets of New York, or confronting congressmen in Brazilian parliament). Other times, she is entirely hidden. Often, it is her voice that drives the story forward (for example: when she reads the coroner’s notes on her sister’s death, or when she narrates the history of Brazil with the support of archive footage).

Neither Elena nor The Edge of Democracy are marketed as autobiographies, yet they are bursting with autobiographical elements. They represent a hybrid and unconventional type of autobiography, one that’s not identified as such. Both films share the topic of death and illness. Elena is sick with depression, while Brazilian democracy is ill with authoritarianism. The two films convey a different message: Elena offers hope and redemption, while The Edge of Democracy purveys gloom and pessimism.

Elena finishes with a positive message of hope. Petra says: “It’s from your death that everything is born… and dances”. The filmmaker thereby reclaims her own desire to live and to create cinema. Art outperforms death, ensuring a continuous life cycle. The redemptive power of cinema reigns supreme.

The Edge of Democracy, on the other hand, wraps up with a message of uncertainty. To this date, nobody is sure whether Brazilian democracy will survive and make it to its 40th birthday (in the year of 2025), or succumb to the illness af authoritarianism and slip into another military dictatorship. Bolsonaro indeed attempted a military coup d’etat in January 2023, after being democratically defeated by Lula (who saw his trumped up charges quashed, following the publication of leak Telegram messages). Should he have the opportunity, he will undoubtedly strike again.

Thirty-nine-year-old Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa has firmly established herself as one of the world’s most honest and original documentarists. She has cleverly injected her films with autobiographical devices in order to create profound, beautiful and sorrowful movies blending the self with the universal.

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Both Elena and The Edge of Democracy are available on Netflix.

The author of this piece is the founder and editor of DMovies, and a Brazilian-born documentarist. In 2021, he directed a political documentarist detailing the vulnerabilities of Brazilian democracy, with Dilma Rousseff as the main protagonist (The Coup d’Etat Factory, 2021).