Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7701 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-09-20
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: Portuguese
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 140 minutes

Synopsis
A documentary recounting the events of June 12, 2000 in Rio de Janeiro when several people fell victim to the hijacking of a bus. Unable to determine the motives of the hijacker, the authorities stood their ground for four hours whilst the television cameras recorded every second, capturing the attention of a nation for the duration of the stand-off. Portuguese dialogue with English subtitles.

Customer Reviews

A film which never loses its focus or immediacy
Images of hostage taking and police sieges are largely restricted to telephoto lens coverage of hijacked planes on a distant landing strip, or the SAS abseiling into a London embassy ... or the fiction of a Bruce Willis movie. The impression you get is of dedicated, well-organised hijackers confronting equally determined and well-organised police and military, even if Hollywood usually has an inept police or military commander doing his best to get in the way of a lone hero.

'Bus 174' paints a different picture. The only thing organised here is the live television coverage. The hijacker is a dysfunctional young man, trapped in a situation beyond his imagination. The police are two steps behind chaos, their uniforms and weaponry never disguising their ineptitude or lack of focus. The audience is the whole of Rio de Janiero and Brazil ... and the world.

Perhaps the most densely and closely filmed live action of its type, director Jose Padilha explains that he was working out at a local gym when he noticed the TV coverage. Like millions of other Brazilians, he became enraptured by the drama unfolding on the screen. He determined to look beyond it, to explore the rationale of the hijacker and his adversaries ... and of the media who flooded in to cover the events.

This is high drama. Street theatre. Padilha sets out to question the nature of violence and its reporting. The siege was wall-to-wall press spectacle, but after it ended, the media fell silent, failing to look beyond the theatre to understand how the script had been written, the characters drawn, and the actors thrust into their roles.

This is an inquiry into how we receive and perceive news, how it is edited, how it is censored and packaged. The cameras thrive on sensation, not explanation. Journalists require sound bites, not sociology or psychological analysis. 'Bus 174' gives us deconstruction of the events and a range of perspectives. What brought Sandro, the hijacker, to the point where he held a handful of people hostage, their terror broadcast in full living colour to the world? What were the police attempting to achieve? How did the media get such uninterrupted access?

Live coverage of the siege went out with scant evidence of censorship or restriction. But Sandro's history was censored by default. He was just a crazy criminal, a homeless street kid with no papers, no official existence beyond his police record, no hope, no prospects. He was anonymous.

Padilha gives him a voice and an identity by interviewing his friends, family, people who had known him and worked with him. It's chilling in places, warm with humanity in others, an objective piece of journalism which grips and holds your attention. Padilha, himself, dramatises the action - building the tension, never disclosing the outcome until it unfolds before you, seemingly still live, still a piece of television you have stumbled upon when channel hopping. It works better as DVD than as a piece of big screen cinema - this is live television which translates perfectly to reproduction on the small screen.

Padilha explores serious social problems. He dissects the horror of being a street kid, abandoned, brutalised, likely to be murdered in your sleep. There is a whole world in Rio which is brutal and brutish, where drug barons rule and corrupt police protect the State, not its citizens. This is intellectually sophisticated reportage ... and utterly riveting.

The DVD extras are a superb accompaniment and complement to the film. There is an interview with Padilha himself - a fascinating insight into the making of the film and an exploration of editing which must be essential viewing for any film student or cinema buff. There are extended interviews with a number of the people who feature in the film, themselves an ironic commentary on how a director edits for effect. Why did he choose the interview material he did? Why did he relegate much of it to extras? How much more do we never see?

Padilha demonstrates how the media thrives on the oxygen of sensation. He shows what good, investigative journalism is capable of. Not as well-known as Michael Moore or as well publicised as 'Supersize Me', but a very fine piece of journalism and a work you can watch again and again without it losing any of its fascination. For anyone interested in a career in journalism or television, this should be required viewing.

He escaped violent death, only to find it later, in a different way.
"On July 12, 2000, the Rio de Janeiro police trapped a man who was trying to rob a bus. He took eleven hostages, and the local SWAT team was called. This incident became known in Brazil as the Bus 174 affair". That is the way in which this Brazilian documentary, directed by Jose Padilha and Felipe Lacerda, begins.

Truth to be told, I was afraid it was going to be too violent. I wasn t wrong, but there is much more to "Bus 174" than violence. This documentary includes live footage regarding what happened, but also interviews with street kids that knew Sandro, the man who ended up as the main protagonist of this tragedy. He didn t have a purpose, he didn t ask for anything, he just was stopped in the middle of a robbery and ended up trapped in a situation he couldn t handle.

The documentary allows us to be witnesses to Sandro s life, and to the events that would take him from his home, to the streets, a reformatory, prison and finally bus 174. Some interviews with a social worker, a sociologist, a journalist and the mediator that worked in this case allow to shed more light on this event, and on Sandro s life. For example, we learn that Sandro never knew his father, and that he witnessed the murder of his mother at a young age. After that, he ran away from his home and started living in the streets, joining a gang of "meninos da rua". Sandro was also one of the survivors of the "Candelaria massacre" of children that lived in the street, that happened in the early 1990 s. He escaped violent death, only to find it later, in a different way.

In general, I think that the directors are trying to point out that the reason why Sandro, a victim of the "Candelaria massacre", became the perpetrator of another tragedy is not circumstantial, but has to do with a system that allows many children to be invisible to those that are well off, until the children grow and confront them with violence. In my opinion, that conclusion may be pertinent for Brazil, but it is also relevant for many other countries. Social exclusion and disregard are never valid answers.

All in all, highly recommended.

Belen Alcat

no movie can match real life
a very important insight ito brazil's social system based on the unfortunate events of a hostage situation.

on the surface it appears to be a nutter taking a bus hostage but once the journalist digs deeper we found out about the troubled lives of thousands of orphans kids who grow up on the streets, stealing to eat 1 meal a day, many addicted to glue and cocaine before they reach 13. And the way black people are treated in poorer/underdevelopd brazil

the hostage footage is very up close and personal.....a must see for anyone!

once we find out about his past it feels as if he then becomes the victim