El Proceso follows, over the course of 140 minutes, the events surrounding Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and ultimate removal from the presidency of Brazil. Using news footage and fly-on-the-wall footage from Dilma’s legal team, the documentary meticulously charts the process leading to what many have described as a coup.
How should art deal with the great affairs of state? There have been a variety of approaches in recent years, from the West Wing, a US approach which turns politics into a melodrama (an attitude which US politics has subsequently decided works effectively and has chosen to adopt as a methodology); to Hare’s stageplays about the Labour party; to Santiago Mitre’s parallelism in El Estudiante. There has also been in British theatre, a wave of “verbatim” theatre, which seeks to recreate events surrounding, for example, the Chilcott Enquiry. TV has since gone further, with the likes of Peter Morgan doing the Deal between Blair and Brown, and so on, an approach which has been hijacked by Netflix, which has recently screened a drama about Lula. There will be a host more. Within many societies, drama is a more effective means of communicating events than documentary, because the cameras aren’t often present when the events of history are being thrashed out. Those who make history prefer to do so in the shadows.
Which is where Ramos’ documentary is all the more remarkable, because, having obtained access to Rousseff’s legal team, she offers an insight which normally only drama might afford. The characters around which the narrative is built are never fleshed out: they don’t need to be. We get to know the dogged defence lawyer, Senator Limbergh and Gleisi Hoffmann who front Dilma’s campaign, observing them both behind-the-scenes and as they make their case with dignity, in spite of the fact they know they’re leading a doomed charge. The votes against Dilma were never going to be altered; once the mechanism of impeachment has trundled into gear, there’s no reversing the process. Something the team grasp, but which they never let defeat them; they still have a role to play within the historical terms of events, to defend their President as honourably as possible, and in so doing, show up the dishonour of those who condemn her.
Ramos’ subjects ensure there’s no issue about which side she’s on; there’s no pretence at objectivity, something which political drama tends to aspire to. If your sympathies aren’t with Rousseff, you’re not going to enjoy this film. But if you’re intrigued by the machinations of history, by the mechanics of a neo-democratic coup, then this is an absorbing and terrifying account, brilliantly rendered with a minimum of hyperbole and a maximum of detail. It’s also a cautionary tale for the 21st century: liberal democracies are just as vulnerable today as they were in the sixties and the seventies. Only, scarily, the opponents of these democracies have decided to employ subtler tools to undermine them. When the mechanisms of state have become overwhelmingly corrupt, how does anyone stop the gravy train?
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