The Producers

Victor Fraga — Director

Victor Fraga is a British-Brazilian journalist and filmmaker. He is the founder and director of DMovies, a leading independent film publications in the UK and Europe, and also a production company. He has previously directed the feature documentary The Coup d'Et at Factory (2021), and the short documentary The Flour Test (2002), both screened in festivals across the globe, broadcast on television and now available for streaming. Both documentaries are provocative activist films. The Coup d'Etat Factory also deals with the topic of media manipulation and slander.

In 2023, Victor produced and co-wrote 'The Visitor', directed by Bruce LaBruce, which premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlinale.

Making The Film

Director's Statement

I was born and raised in Brazil, and I have spent my entire adult life in the United Kingdom. I feel deeply connected to both countries. I watched from afar as the Brazilian democracy began to collapse in 2016. That was when a parliamentary coup took place and president Dilma Rousselff was removed. I realised that the mainstream media played a pivotal role in the demonisation of progressive figures, and lent a hand in the ascension of ultra far-right,. dictatorship-loving Jair Bolsonaro. So I produced and directed a documentary entitled The Coup d'Etat Factory, denouncing the dirty tactics that these communication vehicles utilise. The film was released in 2021, and toured major festivals across Europe and the Americas. It also received theatrical, television and VoD
distribution. This was my contribution towards the country that I left more than two decades earlier, and which continued to dwell inside my heart.

In the year of 2022, I invited Jeremy Corbyn to join me in a panel following a screening of The Coup
d'Etat factory, and we ended up doing having discussion on three different occasions. I had met Jeremy several times due to the solidarity campaign with Brazil. This is when we realised that the events described in the film are also widespread in the United Kingdom. Despite our firm belief that Britain has a far more robust democracy and balanced media, the tricks used in order to degrade vaguely anti-establishment figures, and to assassinate their
character, are remarkably similar on both sides of the Atlantic.

My relationship with Ken Loach started in 2016, when I first interviewed him following his Palme d'Or win with I, Daniel Blake. I have since interviewed him four times.

Jeremy and I invited Ken to participate in the film, still untitled back then. Most of the shooting took place at Sands Studios, a progressive film organisation in Rotherhithe, run by Christine Edzard and Olivier Stockman. Ken's producer Rebecca O'Brien and everybody else at Sixteen was also particularly supportive of the project, providing us with film clips and archive footage.

These interviews were intended to be part of a larger project, also including Noam Chomsky. I interviewed Chomsky for 90 minutes. In fact, this was the penultimate interview he ever gave. The iconic intellectual and activist tragically suffered a major stroke two weeks later, and is now unable to talk and write. I realised, however, that the conversations with Ken and Jeremy were so fruitful that they merited a film of its own. I aim to use the interview with Chomsky for a third film.

It is a tragedy that the shocking manipulation and censorship tactics that I observed in Brazil are widely used in the United Kingdom, the United States and other parts of the so-called "developed" world. Perhaps we are not that developed after all. The Bad Patriots is my contribution to UK democracy and also to Palestine (the film contains a robust message about the hijacking of antisemitism in order to silence criticism of Israel). in the same way that The Coup d'Etat Factory was my contribution to Brazilian democracy.