A Brazilian woman praised by a competitor in the competition for the best documentary statuette

— I am very proud of the community of documentary filmmakers of which I am a part and I must highlight, within it, the work of my colleague Petra Costa, who, with “Democracy in Vertigo” and “Apocalypse in the Tropics”, focuses, from the Brazilian reality, on the central problems of democracy of our time, notably impunity. She’s a genius director.

Poitras won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2015 for “CitizenFour,” based on Edward Snowden’s revelations about the U.S. National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs. Last year, he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, with his “All Beauty and Carnage,” a sweeping documentary account of the political activism of American photographer Nan Goldin, who played a central role in exposing the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and its role in the deaths of thousands of Americans due to the opioid crisis that began in the 1990s.

“Seymour Hersh: In Search of the Truth” takes the biography of the American journalist famous for exposing two of the most serious and consequential war crimes committed by the American armed forces – the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians, including babies, in 1968, and the torture and abuse suffered by prisoners at Abu Ghraib after the US invasion of Iraq in 2004 – to address the cycle of abuse of power and impunity in the United States over the past 60 years.

At the request of GLOBO, Poitras compared how the institutions of the two largest democracies in the Americas have approached the issue. He called the trial and conviction of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who so far “bears the consequences of his actions” a “good sign”:

— This has never happened in the United States, and not just under (President Donald) Trump. (Vice President) Dick Cheney normalized torture and did not die in prison. (President) Richard Nixon resigned and was pardoned. On the other hand, the killing of more than a hundred people during the police operation in Rio last month demonstrates that cover-ups further fuel the cycle of impunity in this country.