For filmmaker Petra Costa, democracy in her native country of Brazil is personal. Two years after Petra was born, the country returned to democratic rule after more than twenty years of military dictatorship. As Petra grew up, so, too, did the country’s democracy. But, in more recent years, as she has meticulously documented in two densely layered and highly personal documentaries — first, in her Academy Award-nominated “The Edge of Democracy,” and now, with her riveting new Netflix documentary “Apocalypse in the Tropics” — Brazil has seen its democratic institutions undermined by a potent mix of right-wing politics and evangelical Christianity.
Petra joins Ken on the pod to discuss the close ties between the right-wing former military officer Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected Brazil’s president in 2018, and the highly influential evangelical pastor Silas Malafaia. Witnessing the dissolution of the line between church and state, Petra describes her own deep dive into the Bible to try to explain where the country’s apocalyptic turn may have come from — and where it may be headed. Told with a poetical and penetrating narration, this chilling tale of Brazil’s teetering democracy has clear resonances with events taking place in the U.S.
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Hidden Gem:
“El Campeón del Mundo (The Champion of the World)”
The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.
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"The American Revolution" with Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein
The version of the American Revolution many of us were taught was focussed on the ideals and principles of the revolution: Independence, democracy, liberty guaranteed by enumerated rights. And if we were taught about the actual conflict, we maybe heard of a few battles in New England and the mid-Atlantic– maybe there was a setback here and there. But the whole thing was presented as basically inevitable: Because of those ideals and principles, and maybe a dose of Providence (as some then thought as well.)
By focusing on the actual conflicts of the era, and the consequences thereof for the greatly divided populace of the Eastern Seaboard of North America in their new 6-part series for PBS, The American Revolution, Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein (Jazz, The Vietnam War, The US and the Holocaust) complicate all of this. While paying proper attention to the motivating ideals, they delineate the role the desire for the lands of Native Americans played in the war, and they show how the conflicts moved–often via waterways, and usually internecine–from New England, to the Mid-Atlantic, to the South. And throughout, victory was not just not preordained, but in fact very contingent on the actions both of some outstanding individuals such as Washington (and yes, Arnold), as well as the strategies and agendas of nations as diverse as the Cayuga and Oneida (and yes, The French).
You can watch The American Revolution on PBS starting November 16th.
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@kenlburns on Instagram & @KenBurns on X
@sarahbotstein on Instagram & @sbotstein on X
@topdocspod on Instagram and X
The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.
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Hot Springs Live 2025: "All the Empty Rooms" with Joshua Seftel
Today we feature a live event that Top Docs held a few weeks ago at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (where our co-host Ken Jacobson serves as Executive Director). After Ken and Mike talk about the origins of Top Docs and some of the memorable moments over the years, Joshua Seftel, who has previously appeared on the pod for his Oscar-nominated “Stranger at the Gate,” joins them to discuss his new short for Netflix, “All the Empty Rooms.” Joshua followed CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they spent 7 years documenting the bedrooms of children killed in school shootings, rooms their parents have preserved over as many as 17 years as they were on the day of the tragedy. The film reveals that rather than just memorials to the past, the rooms provide solace mingled with ongoing pain in the present, and intimate the possible lost futures of the victims.
You can watch “All the Empty Rooms” on Netflix starting December 2nd.
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@jrseftel on Instagram
@topdocspod on Instagram and X/twitter
The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.
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"Mr. Scorsese" with Rebecca Miller
Mr. Scorsese is “Marty” to his friends and “Legend” to admirers and imitators. But he’s also still that kid, the "minuscule asthmatic”--as lovingly described by his ex-wife, Isabella Rossellini--who fervently loved both the movies he watched in Times Square as well as the characters that populated the Little Italy of his youth. The results were "Mean Streets", "Taxi Driver", "Raging Bull", and "Goodfellas".
But as Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”, “Maggie’s Plan”, “Arthur Miller: Writer”) compellingly shows, Scorsese’s triumph was not inevitable, nor is it simply the inevitable result of personal history yoked to directorial will. For while Scorsese has an anthropologist’s eye, his films are not documentaries (except for the documentaries, of course!) Rather, they are the product of his own prodigious preparation combined with a willingness to trust his actors (notably, DiNero and DiCaprio) to improvise–and, in the end, phenomenal editing shaped by deep learning from the French New Wave as well as his decades-long professional relationship with Thelma Schoonmaker. While his films are often grounded in fully formed literary works, he makes of them what director Ari Aster calls “total cinema”. And while the visuals putatively reign, the music often seems to take the lead, almost directing the camera’s movements. And in the end, in complicating the work of what may seem to be one of our most personal filmmakers, Miller suggests that Scorsese's wider purpose is to chronicle “the American project.”
You can watch the 5-part series “Mr. Scorcese” on Apple+
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@rebeccamillerstoryteller on Instagram
@topdocspod on Instagram and X/twitter
The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.
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“Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5” with Raoul Peck
It’s easy to glibly identify what’s happening as “Orwellian”: that we live in an era of “newspeak,” that we have reached the point at which the depths of the surveillance state of 1984 seems all too possible, maybe even already here. But in his new “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5”, Raoul Peck (“I am Not Your Negro”, “Exterminate All the Brutes”, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”) digs much deeper into these possibilities, demonstrating how Orwell’s words resonated throughout the first half of the 20th century, only to become all that much relevant in our own day.
Drawing widely from Orwell’s corpus--not just the later novels, 1984 and Animal Farm but from earlier work and Orwell’s essays as well--Peck gives us a sense of a mind at work, seeking to bring together art and politics to reveal his world’s contradictions. And by fashioning as a spine to the film Orwell’s final months on the remote island of Jura as well as in sanitariums and hospitals and tuberculosis destroyed his lungs, all while striving to finish his final novel, 1984, Peck creates a sense of the mortal urgency facing Orwell then and us now.
“Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5” is now playing in theaters.
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@topdocspod on Instagram and X/twitter
The Presenting Sponsor of "Top Docs" is Netflix.
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