Bus 174 is a careful investigation of the hijack of a bus in Rio, based on an extensive research of stock footage, interviews and official documents.
The hijack took place in 12 June 2000 (Valentine's Day in Brazil) and was broadcast live for 4½ hours. The whole country stopped to watch the drama on TV.
The film tells two parallel stories. Not only does it explain the dramatic events that unfolded as the police tried, and failed, to handle the hijack situation; but it also tells the amazing life story of the hijacker, revealing how a typical Rio de Janeiro street kid was transformed into a violent criminal because society systematically denied him any kind of social existence.
Both stories are interwoven in a such a way that they end up explaining why Brazil, and other countries with similar social and economic problems, are so violent.
Special Agent Matti
Don't you just hate it when bastard politicians interfere with trained professionals who are busy doing their jobs in a life and death situation? And I'm not even talking about Little Johnny Howard.
Bus 174 lets us see that politicians are the same the world over. Bastards. Anyone who wants the job is, by definition, not suitable for the job. Power attracts the corruptible. Absolute power attracts the bastards.
But enough about politicians, let's look at the film. Bus 174 is a powerful documentary. Its power comes from the hijacking. "Crazy man with gun on bus" makes for good documentary as much as it does for good news. Life and death. Good and innocent. Fate and misfortune. The "terror" aspect of hijacking is that it can happen to anyone, anywhere, any time. You could be next. It's the ultimate in reality TV: people trapped in a small space waiting to be evicted one by one - if they're lucky.
All the important ingredients are included in Bus 174:
Think about this the next time you stumble onto the 380 to Bondi.
FYI: The subtitles include italics to indicate when a person is talking off-screen. Unfortunately, they don't match up with the person's off-screenness. My Portuguese is non-existent but it seems that the subtitles are cued to the Portuguese rather than to the visuals. They are also full of spelling errors of the kind that any spell checker would pick up. Just something for you to think about when your film is screened overseas.
MA 15+ (Actual hostage footage, strong violence)
118 minutes (1:58 hours)
Film: 8 April 2004 - Sydney
Film: Undated May 2004 - Melbourne
I was running in a gym when the Bus 174 hijack episode took place. The television started to show live images of a bus surrounded by cops. Since the hijack was taking place in a street next to were I lived I could not head back home, I stayed and watched the whole event on the TV. It was as if the city had stopped: everyone was glued to a TV set, wanting to find out how the hijack would end. (The Bus 174 news broadcast scored the highest television rate of the year in Brazil.) The Rio de Janeiro population is very critical on its regular police, but used to thrust the local SWAT team. So everyone had mixed feelings about how it would end, except for one thing: no one cared about the drugged hijacker, as Sandro was characterised by the news broadcast. Then, after it was all over, the press made an immense coverage of the event, and Bus 174 became, together with the Candelária Street kid massacre, an event that symbolises Rio de Janeiro's violence.
Amazingly enough, one of the things the press found out was that Sandro, the perpetrator of Bus 174, was one of the street kids who had survived the Candelária massacre. A single person had lived through the two of the most tragic stories of urban violence in Brazil! That caught my attention, so I decided to check the raw footage the TV networks had recorded. It took me a couple of weeks and a lot of talk to convince them to show it to me, but when I finally managed it was well worth it: together they had more than 24 hours of footage of a hijack that lasted for only 5 hours! I realised then that Bus 174 was possibly the most well documented hijack on the story of world television broadcast! That was in February 2001. A month latter I managed to get VHS copies of all the footage the TV had made by telling them I was researching the event, and from that day I spent 18 months trying to reconstruct Sandro's life, while simultaneously shooting and editing the film. It was an odd situation, because Marcos (the film producer) and I were personally financing the film even though we had no guarantees that the TVs would end up giving us the final rights for the footage and let us copy their original analogue beta stocks! We worked with a 5 people crew, and shot the film using two DV cameras (one DSR 500 and one PD 250) and one AATON super 16 mm camera for the aerials. Research was conducted with the help of a professional detective, who also worked for the Rio de Janeiro police, and a lawyer. They managed to collect 187 pages of legal documents and police files about Sandro's life, and it took me a month to organise them into a map of Sandro's life. The map led us to locate Sandro's real family for the first time, as well as some of his former friends. It was also the base for the narrative structure of the film, which inter-cuts from the Bus story to Sandro story in a way that they build up a dialogue that is about something that transcends them both: urban violence in developing countries.
It was a delicate film to make because the Rio de Janeiro governor had forbidden the police to talk about the issue, and everyone was afraid to talk about it on camera. During the production of the film we received a couple of strange phone calls that lead us to take security precautions such as installing electronic alarms to protect the editing room and checking our phone lines for taps. I guess we got sort of paranoid since we never got proof that the threats were for real. In any case, not only was the film was very critical on the Rio de Janeiro state police, but it also involved interviewing Sandro's friends, and one of them happened to be a Rio de Janeiro drug dealer and cop killer! (That interview took place because my assistant director decided, without consulting me, to let the drug dealer know our home addresses in case something happened to him because of the interview. I found that out from a remark he made while I was questioning him about a subject he did not want included in the film! It was a good thing: if I had known before I would have never shot that interview!)
After the film was edited I though it would be great to première it at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival. After all Rio was the city were the event took place and it's also my hometown. It was also a good place to try the film, as the Rio de Janeiro audience would be the hardest one to convince since one of the things the film was trying to do was to portrait Sandro as a human being, as someone who had a life story that was important for those who wanted to understand the origins of developing countries urban violence. We managed to get the first print done one day before the festival began! Bus 174 ended up winning both the critics and the public awards at the festival, and that was very good because it gave us a sense of safety. Then things got really better when the film was released theatrically. It brought the Bus 174 affair back to all major Brazilian newspapers, not only in the art sections, but also in the political and national affairs sections. And this time Sandro, who initially had been characterised as a crazy bandit was taken to be a symbol of the way Brazil mishandles its street kids and minor delinquents, and that is more what we hoped for the film.