Missing Peace

Chilling and bold, Manda Bala looks at the victims and villains behind Brazil's kidnapping epidemic.

by Sam Adams

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MASKED DESTRUCTION: Kidnappers such as Magrinho often sever their victims' ears as inducement to their families. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Kidnapping, corruption and frog farming find common ground in Manda Bala, the assured first film from 28-year-old documentary filmmaker Jason Kohn. Shot in Brazil over the last five years, the film has a title that literally means "send a bullet," but according to Kohn, who is half-Brazilian, it's local slang for "let's do it." That tension between imminent violence and heedless forward progress is a large part of what makes Manda Bala such an impressive debut.

Kohn apprenticed under Errol Morris, and the lineage is clear. As in Morris' films, Kohn and his cinematographer, Heloísa Passos, fix their subjects in static medium shots, enhancing the artificiality of interviews rather than dully normalizing them. A further layer of self-consciousness is added by the on-screen presence of Brazilian translators, often positioned at the edge of the wide-screen frames. Very few documentaries have a distinctive look, but despite Morris' obvious influence, Manda Bala strikes out firmly on its own.

The movie's nominal subject is the well-documented kidnapping epidemic in Brazil's major cities, particularly Sao Paolo, where a handful of thriving industries cater to potential and actual victims. Bulletproofing cars is big business, and the city has the world's largest private helicopter fleet to help the wealthy avoid street-level attacks. Kohn interviews a surgeon who specializes in reconstructing ears, which kidnappers frequently sever as an inducement to the victim's families, and includes unsparing but fascinating footage of him fashioning a makeshift ear from rib cartilage.

The movie's most chilling sequence is an interview with a ski-masked kidnapper calling himself Magrinho, who hints in a cold, almost bemused tone at the number of people he's killed. Despite his grisly vocation, though, he sees himself as no different from the people he robs. "Kidnapping works just like a company," he says. "You need structure, employees. It's the same thing." With a large number of children — and, he says, an entire community — depending on his financial support, he shows no remorse for his crimes.

Ultimately, though, Magrinho is not the movie's most nefarious villain. That honor belongs to Jader Barbalho, a high-ranking politician whom the movie accuses of siphoning millions of dollars out of economic reconstruction programs in Brazil's Amazon region, where many of the Sao Paolo kidnappers are thought to hail from. Kohn never accuses Barbalho of violence, even if a number of his subjects practically tremble when the subject is raised. But it's clear he stands with the prosecutor who says, "Corruption is the root of all other crimes."

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The massive frog farm located in the Para province has a place in the story, as an alleged money-laundering front for Barbalho's ill-gotten gains. (Due to a law against indicting sitting politicians, he has never been brought to trial.) But Kohn is clearly more enamored of it as an eye-popping metaphor. He crams the film with shots of frog pools stretching for what seems like miles, and of the factory floor where they are turned into packaged food. Among the movie's most striking images is that of a large frog swallowing a slightly smaller one whole, the little frog's wriggling legs disappearing into its gaping mouth. Such cannibalism, says the farm's owner, is rare. "It only happens when they don't have enough food."

More shocking still is an offhand shot of children playing "kidnapping" in one of Sao Paolo's sprawling slums. Watching a child saw off the ear of his "victim" with a piece of wood, it seems as if such acts have become an appalling, mundane fact of life, as much for them as for the businessman who says he always carries two wallets, expecting one to be robbed. Seeming to barely hold back a breakdown, one woman relates how a kidnapper sliced off her ear, and then the next morning brought her a glass of juice. To him, the mutilation was merely a business decision, no malice involved.

Manda Bala is sometimes more conceptually bold than it has the goods to back up. For all the accusations it lobs at Barbalho, it presents little proof, building up to a shifty interview in which he dodges all the relevant questions. It's often stunning to look at, especially when it's contrasting the gleaming heights of central Sao Paolo with the unbelievable squalor of the slums that sprawl for miles around. But the movie's reality never quite strikes home the way its metaphors do. It's a frog-eat-frog world.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Manda Bala

Directed by Jason Kohn

A City Lights Pictures release