The article aims to articulate the presence of the film Quo Vadis? (Cines, Italy) on the Rio exhibition circuit to the socio-political moment of the First Republic, in which the persecution of Afro-Brazilian religions was very present on the public scene. Our main hypothesis is that the consumption of the film acted to whiten the subjects who were targets of religious persecution and, as a consequence, erasured this persecution and those targeted by the police and other subjects. The selected sources are advertisements published in newspapers, some chronicles found about the film’s presence in cinemas and the film itself. We chose Ginzburg’s evidentiary paradigm to analyze the written sources.