Walter Salles' new film I’m Still Here is a moving, true-story, Oscar-nominated portrait of a middle-class, leftwing family in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s struggling to come to terms with the father's disappearance – 25 years later confirmed as murder – by the Brazilian military dictatorship.
The mother and a teenage daughter spend time inside a regime torture camp too, before being released.
What struck me powerfully in the film was the endless supply of compliant regime officials who impassively, conscientiously carried out the abuse of men, women and children.
It was a reminder that plenty of these people live among us – and that they have been doing very little to hide who they are over the past 16 months.
They are the politicians mangling language and international law by terming as “self-defence” the collective punishment of the people of Gaza through carpet bombing and starvation – crimes against humanity.
They are the police officers raiding people’s homes, and detaining and arresting independent journalists and human rights activists, including Jewish ones, for protesting the slaughter in Gaza.
They are the establishment journalists pretending the carnage inflicted on the people of Gaza is just another routine news story, less important than the death of an elderly actor, or the latest outburst from serial misogynist Andrew Tate.
And, more than anything, they are the army of ordinary people on social media:
- Mocking the families of children shredded by US-supplied bombs;
- Reciting endless claims of "Gazawood" (Gaza-Hollywood), as if the levelling of the tiny territory, visible from outer space, is a fiction and that the only victims are Hamas fighters;
- Defending as a legitimate legal procedure the abduction of hundreds of doctors and nurses from Gaza's hospitals into "detention camps" where torture, sexual abuse and rape are routine;
- Justifying the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals – leaving premature babies, pregnant women, the sick and the elderly to die – on the basis of entirely unsubstantiated, and self-serving, Israeli government claims that each is a Hamas “command and control centre”;
- Cheering the erasure of the only documentary on Gaza humanising its children because the father of the 13-year-old narrator is a scientist appointed by the Hamas government to oversee what was the agricultural sector before Israel destroyed all the enclave’s vegetation.
These people live among us. They grow more confident by the day.
And one day, if we don’t fight them now, they will be putting a hood over our head to take us to a secret location.
They will be across the desk, asking us the same questions over and over again, making us pore over photo albums to find faces we recognise, people we can inform on.
They will lead us to a dirty cell, where there is a hard shelf for a bed, no blanket to keep us warm, no chance to shower, a hole in the ground for a toilet, and one meal to sustain us through the day.
They will escort us silently through long dark corridors to a room where they will be waiting for us.
There will be a chair in the centre of an empty room. They will nod for us to sit down. And then it will begin.
War & Peace