Picture paradise on earth. Now picture that heaven layered with violent slums, littered with destitute street children, guarded by incompetent police, and held under lock and key by dungeons that pass as prisons.
This is modern-day Rio de Janeiro, Brazil-the setting for director Jose Padilha’s brilliant documentary Bus 174. Opening with sweeping aerial pans of the breathtaking Rio de Janeiro coast, Padilha’s camera quickly spirals down to the violent city streets and the medieval underground prisons that plague the city. The bus in question is the site of a hijacking captured live on Brazilian television on June 12, 2000. The perpetrator: a coked-up, gun-wielding street kid, Sandro do Nascimento. The hostages: a handful of young women on their way to work in Rio’s swanky south side. The outcome: an entire country in a state of shock, one hostage shot in the face by an off-target SWAT team bullet, and Sandro do Nascimento lynched in the back of a police van. The reason: Sandro’s desperate attempt to be seen and heard by a Brazilian society that mishandles its juvenile delinquents and shuns the urban poor.
The shocking live footage from the hijacking is the backbone of Bus 174, and the dead Sandro is the main character. As Padilha patches together the five-hour ordeal, he also tells the story of Sandro’s life-one marked by violence, neglect, and horror. Padihla then skillfully turns the tables for Sandro. The lone hijacker, who is vilified by the Brazilian media and public in the years following the event, becomes, through the director’s manipulation, the sympathetic victim of an unjust Brazilian system.
Interviews with Sandro’s family, street friends, fellow prison inmates, hostages and social workers reveal a disturbing tale. At the age of six, Sandro watched his mother get her throat slit. From there, he found his way into street gangs, glue sniffing, and the worst jails in the country. In one particularly riveting scene, Padilha digs up home video footage from 1993. It is a social worker’s birthday party, and she’s celebrating it with dozens of street children, including Sandro. As the kids have fun eating cake and singing songs at the base of Candelaria Church, they answer the cameraman’s question: “What would make you happy?” A home, says one. A blanket, says another. The next night, police cars arrive at the church and, unprovoked, open fire on the 63 street children. Sandro watches as uniformed officers slaughter his young friends.
This event is known as the Candelaria massacre, and along with the Bus 174 hijacking, epitomizes the tragic, urban violence in Brazil. What Padilha shows us with terrifying clarity, however, is that it’s no coincidence that Sandro is party to both.
“It’s better to die than to be in prison,” says an anonymous inmate as the camera pans a crowded Rio jail cell, his face blanked out. Padihla leaves no doubt that Sandro felt the same. An angry and damaged social outcast, he took a bus hostage on a busy, downtown street with no demands and no expectations. He did not want money or helicopters, he wanted to be heard and remembered. Most importantly, he did not want to go back to jail.
Surrounded by only windows on the bus, television crews were able to zoom their lenses in on Sandro’s face, and record his every word. For five hours, the illiterate 20 year-old became something more than an invisible street kid, and drug-addict reject. He became the voice and face of rage, injustice, and marginality in Brazil. Now, for an unsuspecting Brazilian population, it is Sandro’s face and Sandro’s words that haunt their glittering beaches, opulent shopping arcades, and majestic cathedrals, all of which are lined with desperate children and junkie teenagers.
