Border Lands

by
Howard Schumann

"It is no use killing street kids. There will always be more of them" -- 17-year old at the Sao Martinho shelter

Brazil has approximately seven million children working and living on the streets of its cities, finding street life an acceptable alternative to abuse and poverty at home. On the streets, children do whatever it takes to survive, including stealing, drugs, and often murder, and most end up in juvenile detention centers or in prisons where their antisocial behavior is reinforced. In his powerful documentary, Bus 174, José Padilha depicts one of the most publicized media events of 2000, the hijacking of a city bus in a wealthy part of Rio by a former street kid, Sandro do Nacimento, igniting a standoff with the police and a media circus that lasted for hours on live TV.

The film begins with aerial shots of the crowded city while the homeless talk about the reasons they ended up on the streets. The camera then zooms in to a solitary bus surrounded by police. Due to the failure of the Brazilian police to cordon off the area, the crime scene swarmed with cameramen, journalists, police, and passersby, adding to a scene of chaos and confusion. As the drama begins to unfold, we see Sandro holding one hostage by the neck, walking up and down the bus as if not knowing what to do. At first, he seems uncertain, wrapping a towel around his face to hide from the camera and making unusual demands from the police such as a small sum of money, a hand grenade, and a bus driver. Things become more desperate when one of the female hostages writes in lipstick on the windshield "He is going to kill us all at 6:00 . Help us." But the police do nothing except stand around. Later they said that the presence of the live TV cameras inhibited them from taking aggressive measures to end the ordeal.

Using original footage from Global TV and interviews with former hostages, friends and relatives of the hijacker, sociologists, and police who participated in the standoff, Padilha focuses not only on the events as they took place but on the circumstances that may have triggered it. As he said in an interview, "There was a lot of press coverage, but it was cloudy, it wasn't complete. It was focused on the police, and on the political side of the issue. I felt like I was missing something, I was missing the hijacker." What he finds does not justify Sandro's actions, but makes them more comprehensible. Padilha reveals that Sandro, at age 6, witnessed his mother being stabbed to death in a robbery. Unable to come to grips emotionally with the tragedy, he became a street kid in the Copacabana area. By the time of the hijacking, he had spent years in prisons and juvenile detention centers where, according to Padilha, inmates are regularly brutalized. In 1993, he was involved in an incident in front of the Candelaria Church , where he often slept, in which plainclothes policemen intentionally gunned down eight street children, many who were his friends, an incident Sandro recalls emotionally when shouting at the police from inside the bus.

The film also reveals the connection many of the hostages felt with their tormentor, though deeply afraid for their lives. Some felt that they were participating in a made-for-TV movie because Sandro would tell them to pretend that they were in danger (even though he yells at the police that "This ain't no action movie but some serious sh**." Though Padilha retains his objectivity throughout, he uses the hijacking to expose the weaknesses in Brazil 's society that make incidents like this possible. "We treat those kids as though they are invisible," he says. "They're always trying to get your attention, to get your money. And they realized they could get your attention through violence, because violence attracts the media." Bus 174 attracts our attention immediately, and the tension is palpable until its moving conclusion. Like the recent City of God, Bus 174 does not provide any solutions, but shines some light on a problem many would prefer to keep hidden.

Abandoned by his father, 15-year old David (Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc) is sent by his mother to spend the summer with his uncle in the rural Limousin region of France, and has to contend with the backwardness of French country life. Deep Breath, the highly stylized and poetic first feature by Damian Odoul, is a coming-of-age film that uses dreams, ritual, and myth to capture the uncertain passage between adolescence and adulthood. Shot in high contrast black-and-white, Deep Breath is visually striking, and its dreamscapes underscore the director's poetic relationship to the world. While the film displays the influence of Bresson and Cocteau, Odoul's darkly hued tone poem is unique to his artistic vision.

Recently expelled from school, David is unsure of what is expected of him, sometimes lashing out in frustration, at times showing affection, and, more often than not retreating into a private world of images and sounds. He desperately wants to assert his freedom and individualism. "I walk any way I want, even sideways if I feel like it," he says, but his pose hides a deeply insecure self-image. Odoul assaults our senses from the start as we witness the slaughter of a sheep for the daily meal, while his gruff uncle snaps at David to perform menial chores. David, however, is not in a hurry to do anything, and would rather just hang out or dance convulsively while listening to French hip-hop music on his Walkman. When his uncle invites a group of menfriends to drink and gamble at an afternoon barbecue, David is persuaded to join in the afternoon delight and reluctantly agrees to the macho ritual. As the drinking continues, however, the conversation becomes dark.

One man relates that his dad shot a man in the head. "Ah, memories," he sighs. Pierrot, who is plotting to leave his wife and children, warns David: "Get this into your skull -- fathers always abandon their sons." David surrenders to his initiation and gets dead drunk, then tries to sober up by immersing himself in a pool of water, triggering a surreal recollection of his first sexual experience. In a hallucinatory trance, the boy stands helplessly by as the men pour some salty coffee down his throat in a scene with homoerotic overtones. Full of rage, he steals a rifle and wanders off into the fields fantasizing about wolves and looking for his friend Matthieu (Laurent Simon) and his cello-playing girlfriend Aurore (Laure Magadoux).

The film builds inexorably to a climax that becomes a catalyst for changing David's life forever. The rich and strange experience of Deep Breath stays with you, as both haunting metaphor and literal cry from the depths.

In Joshua Marston's small budget film Maria Full of Grace , a headstrong Colombian girl of seventeen (Catalina Sandino Moreno), determined to escape from a country where the average annual income is about $1700, seizes an opportunity to earn $5000 by ingesting and transporting illegal drugs to New York, at considerable risk to herself and her unborn child. Inspired by a woman in his Brooklyn neighborhood who told him her story of swallowing capsules of heroin and boarding a plane for the United States, first-time director Marston has escaped the clichés of social realist films to offer a riveting human odyssey that transcends simplistic messages of good and evil. The picture is shot in documentary style with a hand-held camera in Ecuador and New York, and its authenticity is greatly enhanced by the use of Colombian actors speaking in their native Spanish language.

Maria Alvarez, along with her best friend Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega), works at a job stripping thorns from roses in a village near Bogota. Despite low wages and deplorable working conditions, her pay provides support for her grandmother, mother, sister, and infant nephew to sustain their meager household. After she has words with her boss, she quits her job and soon discovers she is pregnant by a local boy Juan (Wilson Guerrero) whom she does not love and refuses to marry. Feeling trapped, she quickly accepts when Franklin (Jhon Alex Toro), a friend she recently met at a dance, offers her a huge sum of money to smuggle drugs into the U.S. The trick is that she must swallow more than sixty heroin pellets sealed with latex and dental floss, knowing that certain death follows if one of them bursts.

The lovely Moreno, in an Oscar-worthy debut performance, is no cardboard character, but a fully developed human being who epitomizes the desperation of people who are willing to do just about anything to better their life. The tension is almost unbearable as we follow Maria's odyssey into danger. She soon meets drug kingpin Javier (Jaime Osorio Gomez), who explains the operation, and in secret, talks with Lucy (Guilied Lopez), who shares her experience in carrying drugs to America and allows her to practice by swallowing large grapes.

After barely escaping the probing of U.S. Customs Officers in New York , things begin to go wrong and Maria and Blanca must rely on their tremendous resolve to survive in a confusing and lonely environment. Winner of the Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance and two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Maria Full of Grace is not only a hard-hitting jab at a global economic system that allows exploitation of the poor to satisfy the pleasure of the rich, but a richly nuanced coming-of-age story that delivers its hard-edged message with understanding and compassion. It's one of the best films of the year.

©2004 Howard Schumann
CineScene