Abstract
Let us imagine the following real scene: we are inside the latest modern cinema, in a well-to-do Rio de Janeiro neighborhood. On the screen, they are showing a recent film by José Padilha, Elite Squad (2007), winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. This film, a work of fiction, narrates in the first person the daily vicissitudes of Captain Nascimento, a member of BOPE, the special squad of Rio’s military police with responsibility for tackling the city’s narcotics trade. The protagonist is played by Wagner Moura, a much loved actor in Brazil, and the film portrays the difficulties of his job. Although the film presents a fictional narrative, its proximity to reality is undeniable,1 since similar events occur every day in Rio de Janeiro, even just a few meters away from this same cinema. Indeed, the film has a quasi-documentary origin: the detailed facts about BOPE and its operations are taken from the book Elite da tropa, which was written by sociologist Luiz Eduardo Soares and two former captains of the special force.2 As the story unfolds, the film takes the point of view of captain Nascimento, revealing in explicit detail the cruelty with which this military body operates in heart of the city, as well as the cruelty of the drug traffickers. The violence resulting from the confrontations between these two groups invades the screen.
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© 2009 Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page
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Dieleke, E. (2009). O sertão nao virou mar: Images of Violence and the Position of the Spectator in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema. In: Haddu, M., Page, J. (eds) Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622159_5
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