SXSW ’21 REVIEW

SXSW 2021: Racial Dystopia Roosts in Brazilian Social Thriller ‘EXECUTIVE ORDER’

Name: SXSW 2021: Racial Dystopia Roosts in Brazilian Social Thriller ‘EXECUTIVE ORDER’
Item: Executive Order
Rating: 85
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · March 16, 2021

In present-ish day Brazil, the fight for reparations for citizens of African descent reaches a violent impasse. Lawyer Antônio (Alfred Enouch) wants his government to impose equitable laws to atone for the nation’s past sins, chief amongst them slavery, but the fascistic government opts instead to offer a one-way ticket way “back to Africa” as a kind of mocking fuck you to the idea of reparations. Confusion, outrage, and mockery follows but the high-melanized (the term “black” has fallen out of politically-correct vogue) population have no idea how bad things will soon get when the government imposes an executive order that will instead force any citizen with a hint of melanin out of Brazil and back to Africa.

Martial law erupts in the streets, where authoritarian forces round up black folk, beating, arresting, and jailing them for merely living, working, and existing as they always have. With the vast majority of “high-melanized” peoples forced into mass exodus, a few remain to fight for their right to exist and be Brazilian citizens including Antônio, his excitable cousin André (Seu Jorge), and his daring wife Isabel (Adriana Esteves) who becomes separated from her husband and links up with an underground black resistance group.

Controversial and provocative, Executive Order feels like the love child of Get Out and The Handmaid’s Tale; an intersection of fascistic dystopia and long-standing subterranean prejudices boiling to the surface. As the law to oust African-descents goes into effect, a legion of white supremacists touting their European purity lets their worst instincts loose, with some hunting down black people for sport while other, equally despicable, bootlickers rely on bureaucracy to hammer out local resistance. Executive Order movie still

Writer and director Lázaro Ramos delivers the mix of genre thrills and social commentary competently, staging the chaos of his increasingly racist uprising in horrifyingly believable fashion. Violence and resistance go hand in hand and Ramos does a good job world-building the chaotic but credible cacotopia but equally exceeds in building the relationships between Antônio, André, and Isabel, particularly as it relates to progeny amidst panic and the moral difficulty of bringing a child into a broken world.

Enouch, Esteves, and Jorge each deliver standout performances, grounding the heighten reality of Executive Order in real-life anxieties and existing political realities. Through their humanity, Ramos begs audiences to look beyond identity politics of all sorts, to see the man beneath the melanin, the success beyond the gender, the repugnance lining so much political legitimacy. That the thrust of this story is one of cultural celebration, moral victory, and enduring resistance allows the subversive conclusion to bring the whole thing home in satisfactory manner.

CONCLUSION: A disruptive social thriller where a newly-minted Brazilian law forces all black folks to relocate back to Africa,Lázaro Ramos’ ‘Executive Order’ is an entertaining and explosive commentary on racial relationships in governance. The pièce de résistance is the incendiary performances from Alfred Enouch, Adriana Esteves, and Seu Jorge.