Director: Lázaro Ramos
Year: 2020
Lázaro Ramos’ dystopian thriller follows two cosmopolitan couples, all but one of them Black — or in Medida Provisoria’s parlance, “high-melanin” — who are separated and left fighting for survival when an appalling new law destroys life as they know it. Capitu (Taís Araujo), a doctor, lives with lawyer Antonio (Alfred Enoch), a man whose unshakeable faith in the relationship between law and justice will soon be tested. His cousin Andre, an irrepressible journalist (Seu Jorge on fine, ebullient form) and his lover live across the courtyard. Racism is ever-present, but they have built comfortable lives and bright futures.
As the political order slams down to round up and deport all “visibly” Black citizens to countries in Africa, their careers and rights disintegrate. Uniformed thugs hunt and besiege them, tearing children from parents, while racist neighbours who previously had to mutter their discontent enjoy their newfound legal supremacy.
Is this sounding familiar? I first watched Executive Order in 2024, and it’s never been far from my mind. It felt globally prescient then, with racist rhetoric on the increase around Europe and the US, but I didn’t expect to see its narrative play out so literally or so rapidly. It’s now 2026, and several thousand miles north of Brazil, as I speak, brown people in US cities, particularly Minnesota, are running for their lives from rabidly violent ICE goons as their government looks on approvingly. In cinema as in politics, Brazil has a lot to teach other countries about nightmares coming true, if they’d only listen.
Medida Provisoria is about the shattering of illusions; from the impermeability of one’s civil rights to the sanctity of the law and the efficacy of peaceful political action when predatory tyranny crashes through the window. As the nightmare unfolds externally, internally Capitu and Antonio are forced to reassess their sense of self, what their Blackness means to them, and how they are supposed to relate to a society that bluntly defines them only by the melanin content of their skin.
Departing from her extensive telenovela work, Adriana Esteves is chillingly good. She delivers clucking, loathsome sanctimony as Isabel, the prim, officious architect of the policy, dressing up racism as reason, and ethnic cleansing as reparation. The offence she takes at being called racist was mirrored in real life; Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government, in power at the time, took Executive Order personally, and Ramos encountered problems getting the film released in Brazil, while Bolsonaro allies called for a boycott of the film.
Ramos’ dynamic film captures the way that, as far-right ideology takes hold, things can change in an instant. The bright cinematography drinks in the easy elegance of urban life with the close-up, jaunty flair of a music video, before things fall apart. Sharply funny moments are shattered by brutality; people who thought the warped, racist ideas were surely an unfeasible joke; professionals utterly unprepared for how swiftly they would be disenfranchised once more, their hard-won rights stripped away like painter’s tape.
Adjusting to a horrific new reality, for some, survival or escape are their best hope. Others choose resistance, regrouping in secret Afro-bunkers, recalling the quilombos of centuries prior where escaped slaves built communities and mounted resistance — Brazil having been one of the last countries to abolish slavery.
Executive Order asks: how do you – or why should you – assimilate into a society that rejects and dehumanises you? What good is the law when the law itself becomes an obscenity? At the same time, it doesn’t lose sight of the deep personal trauma of losing loved ones and the solidity of ordinary life. In asking hard questions, Ramos never forgets to tell a human story.
