Two Brazilian films about the BOPE, Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, military-grade police specialised in urban environment warfare. I’d meant to see Elite Squad for years, as it comes up on every /pol-approved-film/TV list, and by God it did not disappoint.

The first film focuses mainly on two new BOPE recruits from the perspective of Captain Nascimento, who is hoping one of them can become his successor and he can retire to look after his newborn child. Naturally things don’t work out the way he wants and there is enormous violence.

The second film shifts the focus solidly onto Nascimento as he is kicked upstairs into circles of political corruption.

I loved both films. They are definitely fascist masterpieces, using “fascist” to mean “realistic about the intractable dirt and violence of humanity”. There is a great character in the first, André Mathias, a bespectacled negro who is a Law student at the local university and also a BOPE soldier; scenes with him in a seminar room, surrounded by upper middle class white Leftists who are gibbering about Foucault and police brutality; he looks like he wants to shoot them all in the head. I found it especially pleasing as I know a Brazilian Fascist Chad who won a scholarship to an elite private school and was surrounded by what he calls iphone liberals.

Nascimento is a fantastic character. He has the sad, purposeful eyes of a man long familiar with death.

Every wound, every beating, every torture, every execution, every shoot-out, has left a mark on this face and this soul. Which is how it should be.