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The reality of the changeover from her native country to the far right has seen artists called leftists and criminals, deplores the Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy, who only wants her play on migration is actually a fiction.
The 51-year-old Jatahy documentary, born in Rio, is based on Homer's Odyssey and focuses on the adventures of protagonists of exiled refugees for whom the past is as painful as their future is uncertain.
In The Lingering Now, Jatahy carefully examines the complex difficulties of being a refugee who praised her at the Avignon Festival in the south of France.
She denounced what she called a "criminalization campaign" of artists in her own country since the arrival at the presidential palace of Brazil in January of former army captain Jair Bolsonaro.
"It's a very difficult time to do theater and cinema," explains Jatahy. "They cut subsidies, it's a way to gag," she told AFP, having sometimes appeared on the edge of production on the verge of tears.
"There is a campaign to criminalize artists, calling them leftist. It's such an old trope, "she adds.
The coming to power of Bolsonaro caused an electric shock on the Brazilian cultural scene.
A politician who spoke nostalgically of the military dictatorship of 1964-1985, he had barely received the seal of his post when he was committed to rid his country of "cultural Marxism".
It has also reduced the status of the Ministry of Culture to a mere section of a newly created citizenship ministry.
For Jatahy, the world of theater has oscillated between "anesthesia, because we are still in shock, and the production of many plays that speak of the situation.
"It's impossible not to think of theater as political today," she says, given the current context.
The Lingering Now (O Agora that Demora) is not a play in the clbadic sense of the word, but rather an epic documentary mixed with fiction, which goes from film to stage.
The audience follows protagonists filmed in Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, South Africa, Greece and the Amazon.
They are themselves refugees, but also real-life actors from Beirut, Jenin refugee camp and the Hillbrow Theater in Johannesburg, "at home", including actors who have fled Zimbabwe and Malawi.
The play, which will tour Europe from September, follows their respective journeys, each reading, in their own language, excerpts of the Odyssey before starting to tell their own journey into exile.
Some characters seen telling their fate in cinema also appeared in Avignon, including Yara, a young Syrian woman who survived imprisonment to tell her story at the theater.
Closer to home for Jatahy herself, she also talks about the lives of two Kayapo Indians from the Brazilian Amazon.
It draws on clbadic literary inspiration to tell the story of today's displaced people.
"Ulysses is every one of us while the Cyclops", the one-eyed giant who clashes with Ulysses in the Greek mythology told by Homer in the epic poem, "can be dictators, tanks of war," says Jatahy.
She began working on her latest work before Bolsonaro took office and initially wanted to film Venezuelan refugees in Brazil.
"But the reality (of the election result) has caught me," she says.
"Brazil is my Ithaca (birthplace of Ulysses). Yet, exile is not only abroad, but in her own country, "she added, citing" Indians threatened with genocide in the Amazon, the lungs of the world "with its tropical forest.
"Many Indians die from pneumonia because of the proximity of the city – we pbad on our diseases to them. It's not pessimism, but a reality, "says Jatahy.
His interaction with the Kayapo Indians of the faraway federal state of Para is particularly moving.
"Before, there was no white man here. You could not see a plane for so much forest, "says an Indian.
"We are also Brazilians. We are equal, "he says.
In the same state, the Arara ethnic group complains that timber traffickers regularly plunder land reserved for the indigenous peoples of Brazil since Bolsonaro took office.
Tribal groups have warned the Amazons of growing threats from mining and agricultural lobbyists who consider Bolsonaro, a climate change skeptic, their champion.
"We have to try to change, if only 1%. But it's true that right now I'm very worried about the future, "says Jatahy.
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