Social Change Through Brazilian Documentary Cinema

            The recent years have seen an increase of socially constructive films in the Brazilian Cinema, particularly in the genre of documentary.  While successful fiction films such as Central Station and most recently City of God have contributed to raising the awareness of national and international audiences about the country’s social issues, none provide investigations as thorough as documentaries such as Bus 174 or News from a Private War.  The issues of poverty, violence, corruption, and all others related, have become so complexly intertwined that no plot-driven fictionalized treatment of the subject seems to effectively grasp the subtle complexities of the society, and the contemporary public’s way of dealing with the problems.  Nothing, in other words, speaks as eloquently about the harsh realities of Brazil as the images of a documentary film.

Perhaps because the Brazilian Cinema tends to focus on stories about cultural identity, most of the films that attract international attention end up being about some issue of poverty, street children, or crime.  In a country where half of the population lives in poverty, many in highly populated urban areas, with an estimated 10 million street children, it is natural that these issues dominate the subject of serious films about Brazilian culture.  Where the fiction films fail to address the issue lies in the instilled sense of national pride in every work of Brazilian Cinema, where the tradition is to romanticize the situation of the people, be they poor or criminally inclined, so that their conditions are more of a tragic plight than a socially negotiable state.  Central do Brasil (Central Station, 1998) depicts the life of a low-income schoolteacher whose cynicism and indifference about Brazil’s social problems is reversed after her experience taking charge of a boy that is left homeless when his mother is killed in an accident.  Although it is a wonderfully told heart-breaking tale, the sentimental nature of the film and the idealized portrayal of the rural North East do not leave quite enough space for an engaging analysis of the real problems that face that population, and what should be the responsibilities of the government.  Through the documentary genre, these analyses can be more freely explored, much in the same way as the complex assessments made in The Business of Hunger (1984) about the disparity in the county’s distribution of resources and the problems caused by the exports of cash crops.  Character-driven films may only allow an intellectually driven discussion on the subject to a certain extent, and for as long as is necessary to tell the story.

From the first films that offered intimate portrayals of famous criminals, such as O Cangaceiro (1957) and more recently Corisco e Dada (1996), the industry has sometimes demonstrated how crime and violence can be appealing subjects for the wrong reasons.  O Cangaceiro was one of the first films to offer a personal view of a criminal’s life, taking advantage of the legendary status of figures like Lampião, who terrorized the rural areas of the nation during the early 1900’s.  Films like these did the important work of humanizing the perpetrator of such crimes, and breaking the stigmas about demonized, one-dimensional villains, by showing the crime-lord’s relationship with family, friends and surroundings.  These were nonetheless heroic portrayals of criminals that, one way or another, could be interpreted as a justification for their actions given their unfortunate circumstances, perhaps incorporating more deeply into a fantasy world the already-fantastic reality of crime.

Because they must appeal to large mainstream audiences, these films can only challenge people’s perceptions to a certain extent, most of the time having to retain the audience’s attention through the conventions of cinema, most of which are rooted in the Hollywood film genres.  In a sinister way, as demonstrated in parts of Bus 174, this kind of treatment of the subject can perhaps even serve to further the illusion of criminals themselves, like Sandro, who saw his desperate measures as acts of heroism and constantly compared the horror he had created with scenes from action movies.  While Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002) treated the subject at a more sophisticated level, dealing with matters of police corruption and exposing the harsh consequences of drug-trade in a vivid way rarely seen in recent cinema, it still projected its own standards about violence on the characters, who are based on actual criminals throughout the history of the city.  The slick style of the film is reminiscent of recent successful thriller films like Britain’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and even Hollywood’s Fight Club.  Clearly part of the appeal of films like City of God is the highly stylized action, even if it does its job of replicating in one way or another the horrifying reality of violence.  There is something attractively glamorous about the action genre, however, that mustn’t be constructive on the long-run to the entirety of the social issue.  Therefore, the documentary films coming out of Brazil, while obviously not as popular, are doing their work of bringing challenging and persuasive examinations of the issue to the public.

In a very similar way that the events of the Columbine shooting in 1999 shocked the American people and awakened them to the realities of high school violence, Brazil has had its share of tragedies that caused nation-wide polemics.  Just as the shootings in Littleton, Colorado inspired such films as Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, and the less-effective fictional film Elephant, each of the significant terrorizing events during the past decade in Brazil have sparked a series of densely devised analytical documentaries, similar, but not as humorous as Bowling for Columbine.  There is not much humor to be made of the situation in Brazil.  In fact, the public’s experience with crime has been more of a day-to-day problem rather than a series of isolated tragedies.  One person dies every half-hour in Rio de Janeiro, and one person a day goes missing.  The unorganized urban sprawl, combined with a large disparity between the rich and the poor have created a situation where massive slums, or favelas, have spread over hilltops, and progressively further into the forest, while literally within the same neighborhood are middle-class apartment buildings under constant danger because of stray bullets from regular shoot-outs at the favelas.  Organized crime has increasingly meant armed robberies and break-ins, whether or not people are in their homes during the assault.  The rate of crime and sheer brutal nature of certain occurrences have made the wealthy and middle-class population resentful and indifferent about the plight of the homeless and slum population.

This is where films like Ônibus 174 (Bus 174, 2003) make their most poignant argument, reaching diverse audiences that have experienced the situation first-hand yet are not completely educated about all their causes and repercussions.  The best of these documentaries are ones that start with a single occurrence like the hijacking of a bus in June 2000 by an armed slum-dweller, then examining all the roots and branches of the evidently complex story of this person, Sandro.  Notícias de Uma Guerra Privada (News from a Private War, 1999) took advantage of the commercial success of City of God and, released on same DVD as the feature, provided a closer examination of the contemporary situation of the drug trade in slums in and around Rio.  If City of God seemed exaggeratedly violent and shocking, News proves the real situation to be even worse. 

Other eye-opening Brazilian tragedies have included the 1992 massacre of 110 inmates of the infamous Carandirú Penitentiary in São Paulo.  Prisioneiro da Grade de Ferro (Prisoner of the Iron Bars, 2003) exposed the sub-human conditions of the cells by allowing the inmates to film the documentary themselves through the use of 20 DV cameras.  This issue of over-populated and under-funded prisons is also examined in Bus 174, where the highlight is a horrifying scene that shows the interior of a jail, in reversed colors, like a film negative.  This technique is used to hide the identity of the prisoners without blocking the desperate look on their faces, as they protest their unbearable living conditions.

These films do the under-appreciated work of exposing the injustices done to the unfortunate segments of the population that are forgotten and made invisible by a society that tries to avoid the reality of their problems.  Herein is the central theme of Bus 174 as well.  Besides the hijacking incident, it investigates an earlier tragedy in which the perpetrator of this act, Sandro, was a victim.  In what became known as the Candelária Massacre of 1993, on July 23, eight street children were killed when a group of policemen opened fire on fifty street children, as they slept beside the Candelária Church in the heart of Rio de Janeiro.  Footage is shown of the night previous to the shooting, where a young Sandro can be seen in the background of a series of interviews with street children who talk about their struggles with the police, the regular threats and beatings they receive, and their drug addictions.  Former street children reminisce about their days living in front of the Candelária, bringing a sense of humanity to a segment of the population that is largely seen by the rest of society as mere criminals and delinquents.  “A poll was conducted after the Candelária Massacre,” says one of the social workers interviewed who had formed bonds with many of the street children, “and it revealed that the majority of people were glad that it happened. ‘That’s right, that’s what you have to do with these people, just kill them and get rid of them.’”  The film confronts society with their own hypocritical mentality, alerting those who chose to turn a blind eye to the complex issues that such tragedies as the bus hijacking are, in some way, a product of their own negligence. “The Candelária issue hadn’t been solved, and we were already living another tragedy that was an extension of it,” says a sociologist in one of the interviews.  “It was as though the two ends of the same story finally met.  Sandro, a victim of the Candelária, became the perpetrator of Bus 174.  As if to alert us to the fact that we needed to resolve a more important issue.  An issue bigger than Candelária and Bus 174.”  All these different issues:  the plight of the homeless, the horrid conditions of prisons and the inadequacy of the juvenile shelters that one interviewee calls “the storeroom for junior human beings”; the disorganization of the police force in the face of a hostage crisis, and their general corruption and propagation of injustice; are all interconnected in a way that no fictional narrative could handle effectively.

Kátia Lund’s and Joao Moreira Salles' documentary about drug trade in the slums is a treatment as thorough as any document could be about the subject.   According to News from a Private War, the ever-worsening revolt of the population in poor neighborhoods is due to the bullying of police and military, who are especially trained to keep gangs at a safe distance, contained within the slums and away from wealthy neighborhoods.  There is a cycle of corruption that results, since the main source of armament of these gangs are the illegal trafficking of weapons with the police themselves, while the source of income of the drug lords are the wealthy neighborhoods where their main clients live.  In turn, the police receive bribery from the drug lords who are allowed to continue the drug trade with wealthy customers, who then expect the police to protect them when gangs invade their homes.

These arguments are not formed right away, but gradually, starting first with portraits of individuals and their functions in society.  Private War engages the audience first through the sheer gravity of the situation, listing overwhelming numbers, showing helicopter views of the favelas, endless houses built over each other on hilltops, and the blurred faces of scarred criminals who rap about their desire to murder policemen. “Have you wished that you participated in a war?” the interviewer asks of an officer of the Rio police.  “I am in a war,” he replies almost proudly, “the only difference is I go home at the end of the day”.  Footage from the shoot-outs between cops and gang-members are surreal, as teenage boys with covered faces wield high-caliber machine guns down the winding paths down the hill.  As the viewer is drawn in, and begins to understand the motivations of the all the different “characters”, or facets of society, then the real succinct arguments begin.  It is clear that neither side is innocent, and that they all have their own selfish, albeit justifiable interests in this never-ending struggle.  Attention is drawn to questions of social responsibility, such as why the police allow the upper-class consumption of illegal drugs, while oppressing the innocent population of poor neighborhoods where drug-lords are sometimes deliberately allowed to dwell.

Neither this documentary nor Bus 174 are naïve, however, as to idealize the function of authority in Brazilian society.  An expert journalist is shown in Private War speaking about whether the population would actually be satisfied with the police force if they were to righteously pursue and dismember every segment of corrupt activity in the favelas, thus leaving the drug consumer population without the source of their commodity, as well as leaving countless drug dealers out of work, dissatisfied and angry.  Not to mention that the already inadequate number of jail cells could not handle such an endeavor, neither would there be an adequately equipped or large enough police force to command such operations.  They are left with no choice, it seems, but to sustain the cycle of corruption to the extent that the powerful are satisfied, the powerless are oppressed, and those in between are relatively unharmed and indifferent.  To that extent, the final argument of News from a Private War is rather hopeless, whereas Bus 174, perhaps because of the astonishing nature of the events, is able to reach a more poignant finale.

Throughout José Padilha’s and Felipe Lacerda’s film, footage of the hijacker is shown walking inside the bus, ordering the victims around and making threats out the window during a slowly intensifying situation.  As the interviewee’s recount every detail of the event, Padilha and Lacerda digress with every act into a different part of the hijacker’s story.  We first discover that he is Sandro, a notorious street child that was known to social workers and fellow street children to be a quiet, pensive and heavy drug-user.  He first ended up in the streets when his mother was stabbed to death in front of him, when he was 6.  After exploring that aspect of Sandro’s backstory, we return to the site of the bus to pick up on another detail.  While holding one of the hostages, he yells out the window that if anyone remembers the Candelária Massacre, he was one of the victimized children, and that now it was time for him to repay the police and the world for what they had done to him.  We digress again to a segment on the Candelária, and thus the story of Sandro is slowly revealed, every stage of his life unfolded by one expository segment more shocking than the next, about the much greater problems in Brazilian society.  “I was thinking the whole time,” says one of the girls who was taken hostage, “what could happen in a young man’s life that would bring him at age 21 to hijack and threaten to kill people in a bus, in front of everyone.”  Mainly, we get a sense of the suffering that people like Sandro endure during their childhood, demystifying the image of the villain that all the rest of the media and society seems to be imposing on him.

Right away Padilha and Lacerda establish that all of the media that was present at the site of the hijacking was intrusively attempting to grab any material at any cost, and was one of the fuels for the intensifying situation, since the police was hesitant to make any moves in the presence of live media coverage, and Sandro felt empowered by all the attention.  Hours pass with nothing being done.  When night falls, the documentary takes a terrifying turn, as Sandro appears to kneel one of the girls down and shoot her.  All of this is edited in a very suspenseful fashion, treating each moment of footage as though it were happening for the first time, dwelling on the accompanying descriptions of the inner thoughts of the victims as well as the intricate action happening in and outside the bus.  “There were two different acts going on,” the girls reveal what had actually happened, “one outside the window of the bus for everyone to see, and one inside the bus between us and him.”  Sandro had been telling the girls to act hysterical, a strategy to demonstrate his power and increase the urgency of the situation, where in fact he had said he would not actually shoot them.  “But his mood was so unpredictable, and he was changing his mind all the time,” so the hostages were in fact terrified by the escalating situation.

As the film draws to its climax, and the last of the backstory segments ends with a heart-breaking description of Sandro’s hopes and dreams by his aunt and adoptive mother, Sandro switches the girl that he is holding under his gun with a different hostage, who turns out to be one of the heroes of this story.  “The police had been encouraging me to talk to him, and establish a relationship,” she describes.  “I begged him not to kill him, and I think that when I embraced him looking for consolation, he realized the dilemma in what he was doing.”

At this point, the directors have effectively made clear through all the parallel stories, that Sandro has grown up in a society that has made it impossible for him to progress, where his early encounter with death has left him incorrigibly traumatized, and that any circumstance where he tried to find a sheltering life style was destroyed by his deprecating drug use, or the corrupt powers and systematic social rejection that had made him an invisible child, longing for attention.  The girl is shown sitting in the back of the bus, speaking quietly with Sandro, and during the most powerful moment of the documentary, asks him: “Do you know who is the greatest victim in this bus?  Of this Episode?…You.”  She asks the question that the filmmakers wish to ask their audience, urging them to reexamine their assumptions about what will happen next, in this tragic chain of events that they have so skillfully woven for us.

The conclusion of the film is both surprising and inevitable, recalling the cynicism about society that is stated at the end of News from a Private War, yet with a shimmer of hope that is the overwhelmed, teary faces of the girls in the bus after Sandro has left them unharmed.  Except for one hostage, Geisa, who is shot when both of them march out the door of the bus into the arms of the frantic police.  At the very end the film draws attention to the ambiguity of facts about what actually happened at that moment.  A title reads: “According to the official records Geisa was shot four times: one in the face by the police officer and three in the back by Sandro.”  The chaos that ensues is indescribable, a crowd lynching so exemplary of the incapacity of the police to maintain authority, that no commentary is necessary on that regard.  The image speaks for itself:  all of the tension and bewilderment about the entire event collapse upon one person:  Sandro.  “The people there wanted a show, and at the end of the show the bad guy has to die.”
This statement perfectly displays the problem of interpretation of the issues that in fact have much deeper and severe implications than a struggle of good and bad.  That is why fiction films for the most part fail to represent the intricacies of this reality, because in order to satisfy a world fueled by entertainment, there must be a deconstruction of the vivid and complex truth into a bogged down and idealized version about good and evil people, criminals and their romanticized lives.  Sergio, and countless others, had no part in the romantic life of a movie, and were perhaps creating their own in desperation.

The last shots of the documentary show an entrapped Sergio in the back of a police car, symbolically suffocated by a number of men, dying in silence along with the truth of his situation, while the rest of society watched indifferently, resentful.  One interviewee’s last comment perfectly encapsulates the reoccurring statement of the recent Brazilian Cinema, the outcry of a society that sees the degradation that its beautiful society has come to, through a viciously degenerate blindness and inescapable oppression:
The police does the dirty work that society doesn’t want to deal with.  The people wish that all the Sandros vanish, because they cannot bear reality.  Invisibility is thus easily and perfectly accomplished by death.  And who will protect a Sandro?  No one.

 

Works Consulted

Carter, Adam.  “War on the Streets: Death Squad and Police Violence Towards the Street Children of Brazil.”  http://www.adamcarter.org/docs/street-children.html
Dennison, Stephanie.  “A Meeting of Two Worlds:  Recent Trends in Brazilian Cinema.”  Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2000.
Hudson, Rex A. Ed.  Brazil: A Country Study.  Washington, D.C.:  Federal Research Division, Library of Congress:  1998.
Johnson, Randal.  The Film Industry in Brazil: Culture and the State.  Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987.
Salles, Walter (1998) Interview in Globo, 9 June, Rio de Janeiro.
Stam, Robert.  Brazilian Cinema.  New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 1995.

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