I saw this movie over 4 days. I Tivo'd it and then had to stop after twenty minutes, take time off and then come back to it. Then my wife got involved so I started it again, from the beginning. She dropped out after an hour. "It's too depressing, I feel so helpless, I know there's going to be people killed." So I finally got through it. Wow! It is a documentary about a "street kid" who holds passengers on a bus hostage. For some reason, and this is how the documentary was able to be made, the media was allowed to camp next to the bus. This proves to be the reason the police find themselves hamstrung to resolve the situation in the professional way - which to be blunt would have been to put a bullet through Sandro's head when he gave them ample opportunity - out of fear of letting the TV audience see them act harshly.
It's a movie that covers so many levels, and yet it only tells part of the story. I hated the protagonist, I felt sorry for him. I hated the police, I empathized with them. While the plight of the street kids is covered well, and justifiably is unapologetically sympathetic to them, it is balanced by the reality of a dangerous, hopped up kid with a gun, who wants the audience to see him that way, while telling his captives that they are all part of a media play.
As one of the captives says: "There were two dialogs going on, the one in the bus ("act scared, pretend I've killed you") and the one (projected to the police and media to the outside"- namely:)"I'm going to kill this bitch at 6 o'clock." We can guess the ending! While the drama plays out the movie takes us off on explanatory side trips. We learn about how Sandro became a street kid, after watching his mother murdered, and then become a glue sniffing lost boy, stealing and robbing for his food and his fix. The movie condemns Brazil's society for creating Sandro's, then ignoring him, and then punishing him brutally when he breaks the law. It's the kids against the police, and the police are just adult versions of the kids: poor, desperate angry males given a job with no training.
Read the papers in the last week and you'll see that over 175 of these kids were massacred by police for defending themselves, and it's a recurring theme in Brazil. The street kids are the Sunni and the police are the Shia death squads! What's missing is the story of the police, and the biggest piece of all the story of how/why Brazil got to be this way. The movie doesn't try to offer answers, but it's one hell of a cautionary tale for the future! Think of all the urban mazes that are producing angry, alienated, desperate young males. Think of how they can be manipulated by those who wish to use them for their agendas. Here in the US, in D.C., a trial of a man who used just such a malleable kid to help him pick off a dozen people with a rifle. Then there are the slums of the Middle East and Africa....
It's a movie that covers so many levels, and yet it only tells part of the story. I hated the protagonist, I felt sorry for him. I hated the police, I empathized with them. While the plight of the street kids is covered well, and justifiably is unapologetically sympathetic to them, it is balanced by the reality of a dangerous, hopped up kid with a gun, who wants the audience to see him that way, while telling his captives that they are all part of a media play.
As one of the captives says: "There were two dialogs going on, the one in the bus ("act scared, pretend I've killed you") and the one (projected to the police and media to the outside"- namely:)"I'm going to kill this bitch at 6 o'clock." We can guess the ending! While the drama plays out the movie takes us off on explanatory side trips. We learn about how Sandro became a street kid, after watching his mother murdered, and then become a glue sniffing lost boy, stealing and robbing for his food and his fix. The movie condemns Brazil's society for creating Sandro's, then ignoring him, and then punishing him brutally when he breaks the law. It's the kids against the police, and the police are just adult versions of the kids: poor, desperate angry males given a job with no training.
Read the papers in the last week and you'll see that over 175 of these kids were massacred by police for defending themselves, and it's a recurring theme in Brazil. The street kids are the Sunni and the police are the Shia death squads! What's missing is the story of the police, and the biggest piece of all the story of how/why Brazil got to be this way. The movie doesn't try to offer answers, but it's one hell of a cautionary tale for the future! Think of all the urban mazes that are producing angry, alienated, desperate young males. Think of how they can be manipulated by those who wish to use them for their agendas. Here in the US, in D.C., a trial of a man who used just such a malleable kid to help him pick off a dozen people with a rifle. Then there are the slums of the Middle East and Africa....