Self-taught Brazilian director uses film to educate others

Usually what happens in the aftermath of such a tragedy is that the survivors are helped, and over the years their lives get a little brighter. They are saved.

But that's not the epilogue to the Candelaria massacre. The real story is one of continued tragedy, which is documented in "Bus 174," a feature-length documentary Padilha made when he realized that an incident in 2000 -- another violent crime that gripped his nation -- was tied to the past. One of those street kids grew up to be a drug addict who tried to hijack a bus in the middle of rush hour and then took the riders hostage for hours, with the whole drama broadcast live on TV news to a horrified country. The hijacker, Sandro de Nascimento, who was then 22, screamed to the cameras throughout the ordeal about the way police had treated him during his life.

"The first question in my mind was: `How can this guy go from being a survivor of the Candelaria massacre to the perpetrator of Bus 174?' " Padilha, 35, says in New York, at the end of a worldwide film-festival tour that concluded at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. "He should have been taken care of. He was 10 or 12 years old in 1993. The state clearly made a huge mistake. In Brazil they don't end up getting saved, they end up in some jail."

Padilha, who just became a father, grew up in Rio as the son of an industrialist who once worked as a NASA astrophysicist in Houston. Padilha studied English in school and gained fluency on the junior tennis camp circuit and in England. He became a filmmaker by sheer force of will and charisma.

One day, he decided to quit the financial markets and take advantage of Brazil's tax incentive programs to raise money to make a documentary. Since he knew nothing of the process, he called New York University's filmmaking department and asked to speak to a professor. He was put in touch with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Nigel Noble, who was associated with the NYU program but was then filming in Alaska.

"It was minus 20 degrees where I was filming, and I get a call inviting me to Rio. I said you've got to be kidding," says Noble. When he arrived in Brazil and Padilha picked him up at the airport, Noble figured the young man was the producer's son. But Noble says he quickly realized "that this is an incredibly intelligent man."

Their resulting project, "The Charcoal People," was a short documentary on exploited coal workers in Brazil. It traveled the festival circuit in 1999 and won numerous awards.

Noble went back to the United States and continued working on documentaries; he is now shooting one about a beauty school in Afghanistan. Padilha started to produce and direct on his own, working on specials for National Geographic until he was moved to make "Bus 174" as his feature directorial debut.

Noble says he found Padilha not only to be a competent producer but also a sensitive filmmaker. He figured he was going to be Padilha's partner, not his guide. When told that Padilha wanted a documentary instructor, Noble says with a gasp, "Well, [expletive], he got one."

"What I think I taught him is story -- the logic that an audience needs when it sits in the dark. `Bus 174' demonstrates that he got that hook, line, and sinker. I think I also taught him to go for what's under the surface without being didactic," Noble says.

"Bus 174" not only delves into the four-hour hostage crisis, it also digs into the sociological factors that led de Nascimento to that desperate point. Homeless at age 8 when his mother was murdered in front of him, he never had much of a chance. He was brutalized by the streets, and the Candelaria massacre was hardly the worst of his experiences. He was incarcerated and then escaped from juvenile detention facilities in a seemingly endless pattern. The film neither apologizes for his actions nor glorifies him as a victim. Nevertheless, it does expose rifts in Brazilian society and finds fault with the actions of the police. During the standoff, they are inept at best and dangerous at worst.

"I thought just by talking about Sandro's life that I'd be talking about deeper issues that are important to most Brazilians," Padilha says. "Those street kids are begging to be listened to. When they have a chance to get to the media, they seize it like Sandro did. Street kids -- and terrorists and whoever feels left out -- understand that a good way to get attention is by violence. So a person risks his life in order to get a message across: I explode a bus, my tape will be played."

Padilha is part of a new generation of Brazilian filmmakers who are getting worldwide attention. Trying to explain the violence that Brazilians live with every day has become the chief topic of both narrative and documentary films, with Fernando Meirelles's "City of God" the most prominent example along with Hector Babenco's drama about a prison massacre, "Carandiru," which will be released in 2004. But Padilha doesn't think violence is an obsession.

"People are making films about everything -- ballerinas trying to grow up in the slums, jaguar hunters. Crime is just a subject matter," he says. He says he came to his topic because he wanted to describe his world in the most realistic terms he could: "I see film as a language, in the same sense that mathematics is a language. If I want to talk about how nature works, math is the language to do it. Film is a good language to explain certain things about reality."

Beth Pinsker can be reached at bpinsker@nyc.rr.com.