"Faith and Fury": weapons and souls

"It's not a war, but a genocide" – that's how babalaô Ivanir dos Santos defines the attacks that evangelicals, drug traffickers, and militias have been perpetrating against practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions in the peripheries and communities of large Brazilian cities. Faith and Fury, Marcos Pimentel's impactful documentary, paints a picture of this so-called "holy war," using testimonies from both sides.

The film is divided into segments named after war-related themes. Stories of assaults on people and attacks against Umbanda temples illustrate the climate of religious tyranny. We see shocking images of children being indoctrinated for "spiritual warfare," the formation of paramilitary groups such as the "Army of God" and the "Gladiators of the Altar," of which "Jesus is the general."

The connection between guns and souls has been more than just a pun. The music video for "Facção Jesus Cristo" ends with boys pointing toy guns at the camera and pretending to shoot each other, who fall dead to the ground. Verses, psalms, and the word "Jesus" are hallmarks of territorial conquest in the favelas and suburbs of Rio and Belo Horizonte, where Marcos Pimentel filmed his movie. 

It's worth mentioning that the documentary filmmaker from Minas Gerais converted to the spoken word. For a long time, he made documentaries based on the silent observation of life in cities and in the countryside (Breath, The Part of the World That Belongs to Me (and excellent short films). In this return to talking films, he doesn't mince words. While neo-Pentecostal evangelicals, for the most part, express themselves in their own way – irrational, mythomaniacs, prejudiced – the people of Candomblé and Umbanda demonstrate a fine capacity for analysis and the well-known vocation for tolerance.

It is up to them to dissect what lies behind the persecution they suffer: racism above all, but also the economic power of the new churches with their "Prosperity Theology," the shrewdness in winning over the masses through music and spectacle, their entry into prisons and the recruitment of former criminals, and their alliance with drug traffickers, police officers, and militias. With all this, they acquire a respectable status in the communities. The result is an X-ray of the inner workings of a process that led Brazil into the arms of the far-right, as noted in the end credits. 

This time, Pimentel is more concerned with clearly presenting his arguments than with experimenting with the documentary format. He films with his usual class and composure. He inserts, between the precious words of his characters, an astonishing iconography that combines religion and violence, faith and fury. 

The "war" waged by evangelicals is even more dangerous because it is also directed at themselves. They must fight against their own evil instincts, against the devil that lurks and can emerge from within themselves. The other, then, becomes the embodiment of this threat, which must be destroyed or at least symbolically disfigured. Fascism, in short. Faith and Fury This is yet another film of enormous importance for understanding what we are experiencing.        
>> Faith and Fury is showing in theaters.

The trailer: