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The Long Shadow of the Coup

A run of films tracing political violence from the mutiny and the massacre through martial law to the decades-long reckoning that follows — watch them near each other and the same machinery of power keeps rhyming across continents and eras.

This is festival and film-school canon more than crowd-pleasing comfort: Brazil and Missing go down relatively easy, but the Lav Diaz and Tarr epics demand hours and patience and several titles sit heavy, so save the long, harrowing ones for when you have the day and the nerve.

  • Battleship Potemkin (1925)
  • Sambizanga (1973)
  • Missing (1982)
  • Brazil (1985)
  • Twenty Years Later (1984)
  • Foreign Land (1996)
  • The Act of Killing (2012)
  • Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004)
  • Norte, the End of History (2014)
  • Satantango (1994)
  • I'm Still Here (2024) — The overlooked Walter Salles that rhymes hard with Missing and I'm Still Here's own countrymen — a Rio family gutted by a father's disappearance under the dictatorship and the decades the widow spends demanding the truth; if the reckoning films in this thread landed, this is the one to finally pull down.
  • I Am Cuba (1964) — The gorgeous, near-forgotten Soviet-Cuban fever dream whose swooping camera descends directly from Potemkin's revolutionary grammar — four tales of pre-1959 Cuba building toward the uprising, the propaganda epic to watch for how this thread's machinery of power gets filmed from the inside.
  • Z (1969) — If Missing hit you, this is its sibling you slept on — same director, Costa-Gavras, dismantling the assassination of an opposition leader and the junta's cover-up with the same procedural fury, the political thriller that founded the whole grammar this thread keeps rhyming in.
  • The Look of Silence (2014) — The Act of Killing is already in your thread — this is its devastating companion piece you never queued, Oppenheimer following an optometrist who quietly confronts the men who murdered his brother in the same Indonesian purge, the reckoning to the earlier film's boast.
  • Repentance (1987) — The buried Georgian masterwork about a dead tyrant who won't stay buried — an allegory of Stalinist terror and a town's refusal to let the corpse rest, the surreal deep-cut that gives this thread's decades-long reckoning its strangest, most haunting shape.
  • Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (2024) — Its title says coup d'état outright — the overlooked Grimonprez essay-doc threading the Lumumba assassination and Congo's stolen independence through Cold War jazz diplomacy, the archival companion to Sambizanga's African liberation you'll want next.
  • The Official Story (1985) — The Argentine dictatorship reckoning that slipped off your list — a comfortable history teacher slowly realizing her adopted daughter may be a child of the disappeared, the intimate domestic face of the same terror Missing and I'm Still Here trace.
  • A Twelve-Year Night (2018) — The under-seen Uruguayan one about martial law made unbearably personal — three Tupamaro guerrillas, future president Mujica among them, buried in solitary for twelve years after the '73 coup, the endurance film to pair with this thread's long harrowing stretches.
  • The Secret Agent (2025) — Kleber Mendonça Filho's Recife-1977 thriller is the new one that rhymes directly with I'm Still Here and Brazil — a man dodging the dictatorship's machinery under cover of Carnival, the coup's shadow falling on ordinary life.
  • Argentina 1985 (2022) — If Missing and The Act of Killing landed, this is the recent film to pull down next — the actual courtroom reckoning, prosecutors putting Argentina's junta commanders on trial as the torture testimony pours in.
  • Magellan (2025) — Lav Diaz again, this time tracing the machinery back to its colonial root — the arrival of imperial power that later hardened into the Marcos state of his Evolution and Norte, so save it for when you have the hours.