At Opinion Video, we premiere several dozen short films each year made by independent filmmakers, most of whom are from outside the United States. To discover these gems, our curatorial team combs film festivals, industry events and the hidden corners of the internet in search of undiscovered films that humanize the news coverage and commentary featured daily in The Times. |
Several months ago, I attended a documentary film festival in Brazil called É Tudo Verdade, or "Everything Is True." The winning film, "Incompatible With Life," was an autobiographical documentary by the Brazilian director Eliza Capai, in which she chronicled her experience of getting an abortion. After she recovered, she went on a reporting trip across Brazil, where the procedure is a serious crime, and interviewed other women who had also gotten abortions. For all the differences in their socioeconomic circumstances, all of the women had been forced to undergo the procedure in secret, and all their stories ended with a familiar sense of emotional devastation. |
The film was deeply uncomfortable to watch and brought me to tears. I was particularly moved by its intense intimacy, and by Eliza's courage in documenting some of the saddest and most private moments of her life. |
The film is more than a narrative of Eliza's journey. It is also a bold call to political action. The timing is urgent: It comes at a critical moment for the abortion debate in Brazil. In recent years, the so-called green wave, a political movement for abortion rights in Latin America, has achieved once improbable victories in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico. But Brazil still prohibits abortion, allowing only narrow exceptions that are beyond the reach of most women seeking the procedure. |
A case seeking to decriminalize abortion in Brazil is currently before the nation's Supreme Court. It was filed in 2017 and asks the justices to declare the criminal law on abortion unconstitutional and end the near-total prohibition on abortion. Last week, the court opened voting in the case. The new chief justice, Luis Roberto Barroso, should ensure that the case proceeds without delay. |
As the professor Joanna Erdman writes in a guest essay accompanying the film, "Brazil's women cannot wait any longer for the equality and justice their Constitution promises them." By some estimates, one in seven Brazilian women have had abortions, and a woman dies every two days from the procedure in Brazil, according to activists. Black women are 46 percent more likely to undergo abortions, often in dangerous and clandestine clinics. |
When it was filed, the case now before Brazil's Supreme Court was likely the first to ask a Latin American court to decriminalize abortion. Since then, other courts in the region have issued judgments improving access to the procedure. Eliza's film is a cinematic plea to Brazil's Supreme Court justices to do the same. |
In her guest essay, Erdman, who teaches at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and is an expert in sexual and reproductive health law, argues that Brazil's historic moment has arrived. |
"Only a constitutional future for the women of Brazil and their fundamental rights awaits," Erdman writes. "The time for judgment is now." |
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