MCN Voices: Andrea Gronvall

Bus 174, the riveting new documentary from Brazil, chronicles the hijacking of a Rio de Janeiro bus in 2000 by a young street person, Sandro do Nascimento, a product of the country's brutal prison system. THINKFilm acquired rights when the film premiered at Sundance last January; by the
time it bowed in New York at New Directors/New Films two months later, the indie distributor knew it had picked a winner, a movie equal parts documentary and thriller. Its genesis occurred when
director/writer/producer Jose Padilha, working out at his gym, caught the live telecast of the hijacking. He stayed glued to the coverage of the five-hour siege as it unfolded, and less than a year later was hard at work researching the story behind the news. Bus 174 marks Padilha's debut as a feature director. I talked with him at his home in Rio de Janeiro.

ANDREA GRONVALL: Congratulations on the birth of your son. It's almost symbolic that you're starting a family at a time when your film, through which you are an impassioned advocate for homeless kids in Brazil, is getting an auspicious launch in this country. How did a trained physicist become a documentarian?

JOSE PADILHA: A good way to be employed in Brazil is to study physics--although while I was at university I didn't think it was what I was going to wind up doing. I found my way into film initially through my father, who didn't make movies, but was an investor in film. Also, there was another family connection. We were always involved in the works of the famous Brazilian playwright, Nelson Rodrigues - his brother is my godfather. Through observing his plays being staged and films being produced, I gradually got interested in filmmaking.

GRONVALL: Some American audiences may possibly have read newspaper accounts of the hijacking, but it's unlikely they saw any of the local TV news footage. So, since you are telling the story in chronological order, the "action" as it progresses is very suspenseful -- an effect that is increased when, and to whom, you cut away for the contemporary interviews you shot. It's almost like the news footage has narrative arcs, although Sandro, who was desperate and not very sophisticated, was obviously making his game plan up as he went along.

PADILHA: I could have taken many different approaches to the structure of the film. I decided early on I was going to tell Sandro's story with parallel narratives. First, I would tell the story of the people on the bus, and interview that set of people who were there that day. Then I would tell Sandro's life story, going back to find a set of people who knew him before. First we would review the coverage at the site to understand what happened. Then we would intercut to tell a story that is bigger than any of the participants. After a while, it came to me that the way to do this was to follow Sandro's "leads." For instance, at the moment where Sandro holds a hostage at gunpoint and yells out the window at the police, "You pigs can't terrorize me now! Didn't you kill my friends at Candelaria? I was there!" -- that's when I cut to news footage of the Candelaria massacre [in 1993] and the interview with Sandro's social worker.

GRONVALL: The social worker, Yvonne Bezerra, provided one of the most chilling moments in the film. After the Candelaria massacre [where, in the dead of night and without provocation, police attacked and killed homeless children as they slept outside a cathedral], she heard the results of a radio survey where the public responded that the police were justified, and should be allowed to kill the kids to clean up the streets. As I watched Bus 174, I got this horrible sinking feeling that the larger culture in Brazil is at war with the poor and homeless.

PADILHA: It's very scary. In a later shot when the angry crowd gathers around the bus, that is the same statement that is being made. And it also happens, on a bigger scale, in the war on terrorism, whether in Israel or Iraq. Rage is a bad adviser -- you end up making bad decisions and ultimately creating more violence.

GRONVALL: How difficult was it to get the hijack survivors to open up on camera and relive the trauma? Or had they been interviewed extensively before?

PADILHA: The hostages who were clearly the most important story-wise were Janaina Neves and Luanna Belmont. It was not hard to get them to talk, in part because they were very articulate, and also because they were students at my former university. They had given a lot of interviews before, which was a problem because people in that situation anticipate your questions and give answers they think you want. This results in a feeling of having been rehearsed.

I got around this by doing a little experiment with them. I got them each to watch a tape with the images of the incident edited chronologically. I told them, "Stop the tape anytime you feel like it. If you want to go through with the interview, we can, if you're up to it." This way it was, for them, more like living it again. They hadn't seen the raw stock footage before, only the broadcasts with reporters in front of the cameras. This way made it fresh. It was good for them psychologically to go through it again, even though it was exhausting. One interview took three hours. But they told me they were glad they did it. This is my approach: I invite people to appear in a film by asking them, "Do you want to help me out?"

GRONVALL: That's an inclusive strategy. Film and TV are collaborative media, and you work with your subjects by essentially making them part of your team. You've written that while you were researching, you got the TV stations to lend you 25 hours of footage without knowing you were ever going to get the rights to use the coverage in your final film. How did you eventually get clearances? And to obtain official documents you hired a detective who had worked with the police. You are very bold!

PADILHA: No TV stations gave me the rights to begin with. But Global Network was the most important: it had more than 70% of the footage available, its headquarters were physically close to the hijacking, they had four different cameras there. I kept pestering them first to let me research the film. They are a news organization, and not in the business of making dubs of footage. But I kept coming back at them. It took me six months before I could get a VHS copy. They gave me two days over a weekend to duplicate the footage I needed. When I got that, I assumed they would give me the rights. That was my argument: you gave me the footage, why won't you sell me the rights? Once I got Global, the others followed.

As for the detective, I needed a researcher because Sandro was a street kid without documents like job records, social security, etc. But he had been in trouble with the police, so there had to be documents. The problem is they are not on computer, but locked away in huge archives, and not open to the public. To find the papers, I needed an insider.

GRONVALL: The digital manipulation of images in the film is very striking. Could you talk about this?

PADILHA: I digitally masked the faces of a number of people for three different reasons. One, because of Brazilian law, without authorization from their fathers--and these were homeless kids, many without fathers -- I had to mask the faces of children. Then I also masked some police officers to protect them professionally. Finally, for legal reasons I had to mask some of the faces toward the end of the film, because of an ongoing trial.

Lawyers would have stopped the film from release if I hadn't. I took a big risk creatively in the way I showed the scenes in jail. The conditions I witnessed are indescribable; I felt I was in another world. I had to portray it differently [by a special effect approximating the look of film negatives], because I felt differently. Documentary filmmakers look askance at this kind of conceptualization, but it worked.

Bus 174 opens Friday, October 24 at the Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd.,in Los Angeles for an exclusive one-week engagement.