The latest documentary by Oscar-nominated director Petra Costa (‘The End of Democracy’), premiering out of competition in Venice, was executive produced by Brad Pitt.

Brazilian documentarian Petra Costa continues to chronicle the dire state of democracy in her homeland with the eye-opening exposé Apocalypse in the Tropics (Apocalipse nos Trópicos), delving into the troubling ties linking Christian evangelism and politics all the way up to the highest office.

With its portrayal of fundamentalist agitators, fake news purveyors, the very Trump-like Jair Bolsonaro, and, during an explosive finale, an attack on the country’s capital waged by hordes of insurrectionists, the similarities between events depicted in Tropics and recent U.S. history are uncanny, to say the least.

What makes Tropics so riveting is the way Costa constantly shifts between the epic and the intimate, the macro and the micro. She uses drones and other tools to film massive crowds of protestors like extras in an historical drama, then goes handheld to follow Bolsonaro, as well as re-elected leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as they contend with the religious players forcing them to embrace Christianity in public.

Dividing her movie into chapters whose titles feel apocalyptic in their own right (“The Kingmaker,” “Dominion,” “Genesis”), Costa cleverly uncovers how evangelism arrived on Brazil’s shores via the likes of Billy Graham and Henry Kissinger, who saw the increasingly left-leaning turn of the Catholic church in South America as a danger to U.S. interests. The new name of the game would be “Christ and capitalism,” with fundamentalist pastors flooding Brazil and opening new churches across the land. By the time we arrive at the 2022 election, the country counts 50 million or more evangelists, who can no longer be ignored by any candidate running for office.

In the 2018 presidential election, the outspoken Malafaia throws his weight behind Bolsonaro (whose wife is an evangelist, as evidenced by footage of her speaking in tongues), thus helping propel the far-right provocateur to victory. It’s hard to tell if Bolsonaro, who gets baptized in the Jordan River to prove his Christian bona fides, is a true believer or strategically aligning himself with one of the nation’s most potent political forces. Either way, the people are soon referring to him as a “messiah” — a reference to his actual middle name, Messias, as well as to his promises to save Brazil from the triple threats of corruption, communism and wokeism.

And yet, the many evangelical powers in play, whose apocalyptic visions of Christianity were inspired by an all-too-literal reading of the Book of Revelation centuries ago, and who see Jesus as a violent martyr rather than a figure of peace and brotherly love, do not take their electoral loss lightly. Taking cues from the Jan. 6 riots, they and other Bolsonaro supporters storm government buildings in the capital of Brasília and make their way into the Supreme Court, which they hold responsible for validating Lula’s victory — breaking windows, smashing statues and leaving the place trashed.

Those same institutions are seen at the very start of Costa’s arresting film, in black-and-white archival footage of Oscar Niemeyer supervising the construction of Brasília, one of his greatest architectural legacies. That was back in 1960, when the country’s hopes of becoming a democratic force in the south were still vibrant. But then a military dictatorship, lasting roughly 20 years after the new capital was inaugurated, would quash those hopes for some time.

In Apocalypse in the Tropics, Costa reveals how those hopes are threatened once again, by violent religious forces that have only grown in number and influence over the past decades. The desecration of Niemeyer’s historic buildings after the 2022 elections was not only real but symbolic, and the director hints at this by inserting close-ups of Biblical paintings by artists like Bosch and Bruegel, which reflect Costa’s images of the present. By linking the two, she argues that for those concerned with Brazilian democracy’s future, it’s not apocalypse then, but now.