Bus 174 documentary by Padilha is a compelling film that dares to communicate the facts about the disastrous and risky consequences of one juvenile man’s scarceness, exposure to ferocity, and ruthless handling while in custody. This documentary employs features of camera verité, and direct cinema. A homeless guy Sandro in 2000, boarded a customer vehicle in Rio de Janeiro to raid some travelers and finished up hijacking the vehicle and taking the commuters as hostages. When the guy holds the whole bus hostage, the media transmits it live for all and sundry to watch, a feature of direct cinema. SWAT squad snippers and police diplomats surrounded the means of transport when reporters and viewers watched the ordeal unfold in their wide eyes for about four hours.
Director Padilha utilizes video captured for Brazilian Tv alongside narrations by the victims, police, witnesses, social workers, sociologists, and household and peers of the perpetrator. While less complicated film producers might have merely glued with the felony and the explanation of order and law officials, Padilha applies the tragedy as a chance to evaluate paucity and the predicament of the street individuals in the locality of Rio de Janeiro. When the hostage-taker was merely 10 years of age, he viewed his mom, a shop attendant in the neighborhood’s working-class, being knifed to death. An aunt attempted to assist him in overcoming. Still, Santo fled to the streets, where he linked with thousands of other juveniles practicing immoral acts like penhandling, robbery, and stealing to maintain their lives. The majority of them snuffle glue to numb from the instability of their being and the risks confronting them.
Santo endured the police killings of seven street kids sleeping close to a worshipping place in 1991. He used up time in custody and later was assisted by a lady who provided him with accommodation. But the attraction of drugs and risk was always in his blood, and he revisited the streets. The hostage condition and the media reportage facilitated Santo to pop out of the situation of invisibility in order to be viewed and heard for the initial time. This annoyed hijacker holds a handgun to the heads of several hostages and yells out his requirements to the police force standing merely outside the vehicle. However, the SWAT gunmen have several vivid shots at him, and they are hardly allowed the greenlight. By that section in the film, it’s clear about the human denial of Rio’s highway. The camera moves inside a congested prison, where the captives press their appearance against the blocks and scream out their strong protests versus the inhuman treatment they endure. Captivation rooms are so congested that the convicts must stay in shifts, half-standing while the other half lying down., the temperature is unfavorable; it exceeds 100 degrees in each cell. Hygiene is demanding as water is unhealthy, food is unpleasant, infections run swiftly through the cells, and some captives are abandoned for several months or years without reporting charges.
The director, Padilha, records this sight with a digital video camera, utilizing the negative style that substitutes black with white tint, a characteristic of camera verité. The faces behindhand the bars scream out like burning souls in eternal hell. A state that could allow these situations dare not brand itself civilized. Since captives are the lowermost inhabitants of any community, how humanity handles them reveals in what respect they value human beings in regards to human rights and human dignity. That restraining centers like this are in Brazil causes it to be less appalling that the streets are full of the forgotten and lost. Even more appalling is the empathy of numerous of the lady captives for the captor. Padilha’s convincing film is full of such astonishments, not the slightest of what is denial to dramatize this sad narration. Rather he taunts to say the facts concerning the dangerous and tragic repercussions of Santo’s drug addiction, poverty, exposure to viciousness, and cruel handling in Prison. The movie scrutinizes the event and what life is actually like in the vicinities and shantytowns of Rio street and in what manner the criminal fairness structure in Brazil handles the lower rank individuals. It is clear that the culprit justice structure does not treat the lower-class people with humanity compared to the judgment accorded to the working-class individuals. The ending of the Bus 174 film is mutually inevitable and surprising. The bus takeover captured the state’s consideration in a manner that exaggerated the dilemma of the dispossessed, and the documentary, by recording the conditions of Sandro and uncountable others, depicts that the voyage began long earlier than the travelers boarded the vehicle.
Bibliography
“Bus 174- Watch the Full Documentary.” YouTube, Web.
Bruzzi, Stella. “New Documentary: A critical introduction.” Taylor &Francis Group, 2006.
Rich, Ruby. “introduction.” University of California press 67, No.2 (2013):8-9