RIO DE JANEIRO — The masked assailants crept up to the building hours before dawn on Christmas Eve and lobbed a handful of Molotov cocktails.

Their target: a Rio de Janeiro-based film company that has come under criticism for producing a Netflix movie depicting Jesus Christ as a gay man.

The firebombs did little damage to the building and hurt no one. But hours later, a video posted online by three men taking credit for the attack made clear this was an effort to silence artists whose works take aim at conservatives and their worldview.

The video included footage of the act and featured a masked man who said, in a distorted voice, that the group set out to “seek justice” on behalf of “all Brazilians against the blasphemous, bourgeois and anti-patriotic attitude” of the filmmakers, who were denounced as “militant Marxists.”