Blame it on Rio

Brazilian director Jose Padilha talks about "Bus 174," his shocking documentary about the Rio street kid who hijacked a bus -- and forced a nation to confront its epidemic of violence.

By David Ng

Oct 8, 2003 | If your familiarity with Rio de Janeiro's never-ending crime epidemic consists of an infamous "Simpsons" episode or the favela chic of Fernando Meirelles' art-house hit "City of God," then the new documentary "Bus 174" will feel instantly sobering, if not shockingly raw. On June 12, 2000, a gunman hijacked a Rio bus in broad daylight and held a dozen passengers hostage in a five-hour standoff with the police. Ordinarily, such a routine act of violence might not have generated much public fascination, but due to police carelessness, the entire ordeal was caught live on national television, becoming Brazil's closest approximation to the O.J. Simpson freeway chase. The ensuing media orgy enabled the hijacker, a 21-year-old street kid named Sandro do Nascimento, to seize control of the fragile situation and become an instant superstar in the process. (The broadcast scored the highest TV ratings in Brazil that year.)

Director José Padilha sifted through more than 24 hours of video footage to reconstruct the events of that surreal day. Supplemented by interviews with cops, social workers and the street kids with whom Nascimento spent much of his life, "Bus 174" mounts an ambitious investigation into the origins of urban violence. We learn that as a child Nascimento watched as gangsters gunned down his mother on her doorstep. At 14, he narrowly escaped death in the Candelaria massacre, a notorious raid in which the police murdered eight street kids. He spent his last years in and out of various institutions, a juvenile delinquent all but invisible to the larger society.

As painstakingly as he chronicles Nascimento's life, and particularly his final hours, Padilha (who is a physicist by training) seems guided foremost by the uncertainty principle. The closer the movie zooms in on Nascimento, the more spectral and elusive he becomes -- like a particle wave in perpetual, unobservable motion. In one unnerving scene, he shoves the barrel of his gun under a hostage's chin and says that he's going to kill her. But the hostage's testimony (culled by Padilha months after the event) reveals a different story: She says Nascimento had no intention of pulling the trigger and that he had instructed his otherwise calm hostages to cry and feign hysteria. Such ambiguity -- psychological and emotional -- pervades "Bus 174" like an alluring fog: The farther in we venture, the less we ultimately understand.

Salon recently spoke with director José Padilha. "Bus 174" opens this week at Film Forum in New York and will open in other major cities later this year. HBO plans a 2004 air date.

"Bus 174" has played to great critical and popular success in Brazil. Do you think people have a need to collectively relive traumatic events and to work them out in their heads?

I don't feel that it was a question of the city needing to revive the event. I felt like it would actually have been forgotten because you have so many violent events like that in the city. After Bus 174, there was this journalist from Global Network who was tortured to death by drug dealers in a favela. I don't know if you heard about that in the U.S. And a few weeks ago, there was a Chinese man who had become a Brazilian citizen and was trying to get out of the country. He was detained by the police and was tortured to death in jail.

So you're saying that movies like "City of God," which show incredible amounts of street violence, are not exaggerating that much after all.

There are no arguments against facts. Eleven people in Rio are murdered every day. Those are the official records. If you take into account that some murders are not reported, maybe the number is 20 for a day. If you add these numbers for a whole year, more people are murdered in Rio in one year than all the people who've been killed in the whole of the Israeli-Palestinian intifada since it began. So it's a reality.

Did you encounter any government resistance while making "Bus 174"? Did anyone try to dissuade you from making an unflattering portrait of the city?

Out of the chaos of the Brazilian government come some good things, one of which is that the government is simply not organized enough to control movies. So you get away with films like this, or like "City of God." In fact, "Bus 174" was partly financed by the city of Rio de Janeiro. I met the mayor once and I asked him, "Don't you think this movie is bad for tourism?" He said it's bad for tourism if you pretend it's not there. You have to be open about what's going on and face the problems.

Yet in the movie when you interview several police officers, some of them are wearing masks. Was this because they had to speak off the record?

It's because if the governor saw their faces, they would be fired, or they would be arrested. One of them was arrested for 30 days for speaking about Bus 174 to a journalist and that was before my film. He spoke on television and he was sent to jail. So there was a great deal of censorship. And it was amazing that one officer agreed to talk to us without wearing a mask -- he was the negotiator. He did it because by that time, the governor was already out of office. Otherwise he wouldn't have done it.

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