Fellipe Lopes joins Frank Armstrong to discuss the results of the first round of the Brazilian Presidential elections in which former President Lula failed to secure the required 50% to avoid a second round run-off against the incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro. Nonetheless, Lula remains favourite to win in the second round.
However, Fellipe argues that Bolsonaro “has already won the election”, given that ultraconservative candidates have emerged victorious in state legislatures and the Congress. It will be difficult for Lula to do very much, he says, even if, as assumed, Lula wins the second round.
The importance of Brazil in the world cannot be overstated. It contains most of Amazonia, the lungs of the world, and a huge, and growing, population of over two hundred million. Many Brazilians are living in Ireland now too.
Fellipes points to the historic difficulties of Lula’s P.T. (Workers’ Party), arising particularly after the impeachment of President Dilma, and a number of corruption scandals.
He also looks back at Bolsonaro’s background. For a long time he was an unremarkable representative for Rio de Janeiro, but he was able to connect with the public through cheap jokes and an emphasis on family values and law and order.
They also discuss the importance of Evangelical Christianity in Brazil, which has been around for a long time in an historically Catholic country. Many pastors are now powerful political figures.
Fellipe argues that the Brazilian left failed to connect adequately with vulnerable communities, unlike their opponents, who have also been adept at harnessing the power of social media.
“Nuances”is a work in progress by South American documentary maker Fellipe Lopes. Since May 2021, Lopes has been on the ground in some of the most notorious refugee camps in Europe, on the Greek island of Lesvos (Lesbos), just off the coast of Turkey.
“Nuances” seeks to understand the ‘refugee crisis’ from the perspective of asylum seekers and refugees, and their relationship with humanitarian workers and volunteers living and working on the island. Lopes is soon to finish the interviews and the recording of the documentary. Until now, Lopes has been working voluntarily, at his own expense. He has now started a Kickstarter to crowdsource €7,000 for the next stage of the project, including post production and distribution.
Daniele Idini (DI): How long have you been in Lesvos now and what’s the situation like?
Fellipe Lopes (FL): So I have been in Lesvos for the last six months and working on this documentary since I arrived. This documentary is a collection of interviews with asylum seekers, refugees, migrants explaining the challenges they are facing. It seems like they basically have only one option when it comes to work, which is basically to work as an interpreter. And this is not something that makes all the migrants and refugees happy because they are revisiting all the trauma through other people’s experience.
DI: So basically, you are saying this work is, in a way, necessary for the camp’s operation, but is, in a way, preventing migrants from escaping the camp’s system,.
FL: Exactly. These migrants are well suited to this kind of work, because they often speak the necessary languages – it might be Farsi, or Arabic, Lingala or French. They also can understand the struggles other refugees have been through, having experienced similar things themselves. On the other hand, however, they have ended up working in the humanitarian sector when they actually need humanitarian support.
This is one of the topics covered in the documentary. Another issue, is the kind of social and legal challenges humanitarian workers are facing here. It’s about the authorities. The role of the police force and the army in regards to upholding the right of media coverage.
The documentary is set with the island of Lesvos, and its capital Myteline, in the background. But the documentary centres on the stories that happen inside the camp, stories that happens outside of the camp, and the reasons and motivations for those asylum seekers coming to Greece. And as well, we have a really interesting part of the documentary that examines the pushback happening here in the Aegean Sea, which divides Turkey and Greece.
We have a lawyer who’s been working around issues related to pushbacks for the last five years. We also have a German journalist who’s been covering all the pushbacks as well for the last three years. Obviously, the situation in Lesbos is so dynamic and things are changing rapidly. It’s been really challenging for me to keep up with this story. Things have moved so fast, and that’s maybe the reason I’m still here, and will stay a little bit longer, because these are stories that are developing.
The dynamics in the camps are changing, which is new. They call this the new camp, which is where they’re trying to reduce the number of asylum seekers. Since the fire that happened last year, the government promised to build a new camp. But this never happened, basically because the local community are against new camps in the area. As a result, the temporary camps have become the de facto new camp.
DI: So your documentary also tackles the relationship between the refugee camps and the local community?
FL: Yes. I spoke with locals. Some are understanding of the necessity for a new camp. With that said, whether there is a new one or not, there are still 3,000 migrants on the island awaiting resolution of their cases. – building a new camp won’t solve the problem. they need to be processed
Obviously, the freedom of these people is highly restricted.
In the end, everything goes back to the camp. It isn’t a liveable reality. There are no schools in the camp and there’s only precarious legal and medical support.
Last week, a woman passed away inside of the camp, for example. This is the reality that is happening in Lesvos. And everybody expects another massive wave of asylum seekers coming to Greece due to the situation in Afghanistan. Less and less will reach the Greek shore, however, because of the increased activity of the Greek coastguard and the European Frontex.
Demonstration in support to Afghanistan.
DI: Why should the general public support the making of this documentary?
FL: It’s an overview of a situation that’s happening in Europe; it’s happening in Greece, through Greek laws, through the Greek system. But there are comparable problems in terms of the pushback between Bosnia and Croatia. The same thing is happening between Belarus and Poland. The same thing is happening in the Mediterranean Sea, between Libya and Italy, in Libya itself, and in Spain.
This documentary shows that there is still a massive flood of refugees coming to Europe and obviously the policies in place are not facilitating those asylum seekers to claim asylum in Greece. This documentary is set in Lesvos, but it records something that is happening throughout Europe’s borders.
People keep using this term a ‘refugee crisis’. This is a mistake. More than a refugee crisis, there is a policy crisis.
What we’re witnessing is a series of legal decisions that are impacting the lives of those who are exercising a right to apply for asylum in Europe. These people are not criminals. The Geneva Convention guarantees them a right to apply for asylum. But this right is not being upheld properly. People are waiting one, two, three, or even over five years to have their claims processed.
Interview edited for brevity and clarity by Ben Pantrey.
Here begins our journey back through the #unforgettableyear of 2020…
The drone-strike assassination of Qassem Soleimani on January 3rd, 2020 seems a long time ago now, but to our U.S. columnist Bull Moose it suggested a new phase in U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Who knows what would have happened in that region during an election year, if a certain respiratory pathogen hadn’t risen to such prominence.
In October last, I was at a Russian Circles gig in Galway. It gave me a much needed stark reminder of the power of live sound: washing over me, enveloping, reverberating my insides, shaking me out of an internal slumber. Requiring a medium to travel, the body is a conductor for sound. Filtering vibrations moving through it. Sound percolating in time through tissue and sinew, connecting, evading, resonating, confronting, decoding, making pliable.
I emerged from the show a renewed being: sensorially realigned, perceiving things afresh, and happy I made the effort to go. As Rumi says, ‘whatever purifies you is the right path’.
Hilary Woods, by the photographer Joshua James Wright.
Elsewhere Billy O’Hanluain seemed to have been preparing us for the joys of working from home, surrounding by unfinished tasks. ‘Procrastination is a very cunning mistress.’ he wrote, ‘She masquerades so expertly at being a muse; seducing me with an ever expanding array of tantalizing tasks that acquire greater urgency with her every whisper and sensual suggestion.’
On a less optimistic note, Frank Armstrong explored how increasing news fatigue had been orchestrated by the likes of Steve Bannon, who targeted followers of Jordan Peterson, who has earned the dubious distinction of being the first internet intellectual.
Meanwhile, featured artist Keshet Zur aspired to be a photographer but felt heartbrake in the digital era, now she engages with nature and social inclusion through Expressive Art Therapy.
Keshet Zur
Bob Quinn’s memoir continued with an account from the 1950s of teaching English in Pforzheim, Germany, where a student Trudie falls for his teaching charms
David Langwallner also continued his public intellectual series with an account of the life and times of Noam Chomsky, with reference to his works Manufacturing Consent, Public Intellectual, Media Control, Henry Kissinger, George Orwell.
Next there was Frank Armstrong’s Late Risers’ Manifesto 2020, in which he quoted the late great David Graeber to the effect that ‘The real question is how to ratchet down a bit more toward a society where people can live more by working less.’ Graeber further opined that the non-working poor may be ‘pioneers of a new economic order that would not share our current one’s penchant for self-annihilation.’
In fiction, Siberian Blue by Mick Sobyanin includes childhood memories of Prokopyevsk, Siberia inside the Soviet Union, dating from 1974, including insights into prevailing Russian attitudes towards Volga Germans.
Lastly we had a satirical poem from the irrepressible Kevin Higgins irreverently portraying the grant application process.
