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Bus 174
Felipe Lacerda & Jose Padiha, Brazil, 2002; 122 mins.
The 2002 film City of God presented a
Pulp-Fictiony look at the violent slum life of Rio de Janeiro, where poverty,
a lack of options, and boredom mix with the identity-questing and power-games
of youth — not to mention a crazy plenitude of guns — to drive
the story to a tragically-predictable end. In Bus 174, we step back one
circle in this Brazilian Inferno, in effect making that usually invisible
story the center ring of a real-life media circus. On June 12, 2000, a Rio
city bus was hijacked and held hostage by a desperate young man nurtured in
the environment described above, but in this case the end result was captured
on live television. This brilliant documentary intercuts the sensational
media coverage with an investigation into the story-behind-the-story,
contrasting the exploitative "Reality TV" with the facts of Sandro do
Nascimento's life that led to his own tragic end, focusing on the conditions
that ultimately created the media event, and implicating the bloodthirsty TV
audience in what transpired. "You think this is a movie?" he yells to the
television crews, and us, and the answer is, in a confusing way, both "Yes"
and "No", and we are left to consider our own mixed motivations and even
culpability.
Bus 174
is part of "Lost Boys" track of the Featured Screenings program at Flickerings at Cornerstone Festival,
July 1-4, 2004.See complete Schedule
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