Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Bus 174 - AMAZING FLM!

The film is adramatization based on real events from June 12, 2000, about the bus hijacking that occurred in Rio de Janeiro. Sandro do Nascimento, a young man from a poor background, bungled a robbery and ended up holding the passengers on a bus hostage for four hours. The event was caught live on television. The movie examines the incident and what life is like in the slums and favelas of Rio de Janeiro and how the criminal justice system in Braziltreats the lower classes. Within the film, Padilha interviews former and current street children, members of the Rio police force, the highly regarded Rio SWAT team, family members, and sociologists in order to gain insight about what led Nascimento to carry out the hijacking.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Innocent Voices

More than 300,000 children presently serve in armies in over 40 countries.

Based on the true story of screenwriter Oscar Torres's embattled childhood, Luis Mandoki's Innocent Voices is the poignant tale of Chava (Carlos Padilla), an eleven-year-old boy who suddenly becomes the "man of the house" after his father abandons the family in the middle of a civil war.

In El Salvador in the 1980s, the government's armed forces are already recruiting twelve year olds, rousting them out of their classes at the local middle school. If he is lucky, Chava has just one year of innocence left, one year before he, too, will be conscripted to fight the government's battle against the peasant rebels of the FMLN. Chava's life becomes a game of survival, not only from the bullets of the escalating war, but also from the dispiriting effects of daily violence. As he hustles to find work to help his single mother pay the bills, and experiences the pangs of first love for a beautiful classmate, Chava's tiny home village becomes both playground and battlefield.

Armed only with the love of his mother (Leonor Varela) and a small radio that broadcasts a forbidden anthem of love and peace, and faced with the impossible choice of joining either the army or the rebels, Chava finds the courage to keep his heart open, and his spirit alive, in his race against time.