Ride through Rio's mean streets at Berlin festival
BERLIN (AFP) — A blood-soaked drama based on accounts of police brutality in Rio de Janeiro had its foreign premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Monday after becoming an underground hit in Brazil.
"Tropa de Elite" (Elite Guard) depicts a police clean-up campaign in Rio's crime-infested favelas, with scenes of teenage dealers being tortured with plastic bags over their heads and druglords shot at point-blank range.
The film is set in 1997, ahead of a visit to Brazil by Pope John Paul II, and members of Rio's Police Special Operations Battalion (BOPE) are given orders to clean up the slums "so that the pope can sleep".
"Operation Holiness" spirals out of control as the squad leader recruits two young cops to replace him because his wife is pregnant and he is cracking under the strain of routinely confronting death.
Director Jose Padilha, a documentary-maker who admires Martin Scorsese, told a press conference "every scene in the film is based on truth".
"We have a very corrupt police force, a very violent police force. In Rio de Janeiro, 1,200 people a year are killed by the police. The population hates the police and with very good reason."
He said the script was co-written with a member of BOPE and the actors spent months with other members of the squad.
"In America, you go to war and you come back and you cannot adjust. In Rio you go to war every night and every morning you have to adjust," Padilha said.
"The protagonist has based his whole life on the premise that every night he can go into the favela and kill people. But now he realises that his stupid identity does even allow himself to have a family."
Before its release in October, the film became a bootleg sensation in Brazil after a copy was stolen during production and distributed on the Internet.
The producers estimate that 11.5 million people watched the pirate copy before the film premiered at the Rio film festival in September.
By then "Tropa de Elita" was arguably the most talked-about film in Brazilian movie history and Padilha said he could only guess why an unfinished cut was stolen.
"I think there were people who saw sort of revenge -- 'We hate the police, the police are going to try and stop this movie, so let's get the movie out.'"
BOPE, a unit of 100 men in a police force of 30,000, went to court to seek a ban on the film, or at least have the torture scenes cut, but failed.
"Fortunately for us the judge very quickly said: 'This is exactly how Rio is and the movie should be seen'," Padilha said.
An unsteady camera and Padilha's documentary style, which he deliberately preserved for his first feature, adds to the film's realism.
"I wanted to make a documentary but I realised that nobody would talk to me (on camera) and that we would probably be shot."
He said the film crew had to bribe druglords before they could shoot in five of Rio's shantytowns and then convince police not to enter the areas where they were working to avoid gun battles breaking out near the set.
The on-screen gangsters carry Uzis and burn informants alive inside car tyres, creating an atmosphere that at times pushes the audience to sympathise with the police.
Some critics have called the film fascist -- a label rejected by both the director and lead actor Wagner Moura.
"There are people who felt that the cop is a hero for killing bad guys but it's a minority," Moura said.
Padilha said ultimately he did not want to indict BOPE but a middle class that consumes drugs without thinking where they come from and a system that underpays police to the point where many end up on the payroll of druglords.
"In Rio if you are an honest cop you have to become violent," he said.
"A society cannot sustain itself if it fights violence with violence. And the fact that drugs are forbidden kills a lot of people. I think they should be legal."
"Tropa de Elite" is one of 21 films screening in competition at the Berlinale.
