'Secuestro Express' - Jonathan Jakubowicz Q&A

Time Out meets the director of the controversial kidnap drama.

Jun  9 2006

Caracas-born 28-year-old Jonathan Jakubowicz wrote and directed 'Secuestro Express', a tough kidnapping drama and the first Venezuelan feature to be distributed internationally. Its portrait of a divided society has earned the wrath of the ruling Chavez government however, and Jakubowicz currently faces two charges relating to the film, one from a state official objecting to the use of his image in a news montage, another alleging defamation of the security forces.

Did the film emerge from personal experience?

I've been kidnapped myself and so have many of my friends, but I tried to understand the reasons this was happening. The conditions in Venezuela are so harsh for the poor. We had 14, 000 deaths from street violence last year. Those are like war figures. The film doesn't necessarily embrace crime as a solution but it does point to the origins of the crime and explain that it's really a vehicle for social revenge. It's like we've reached a point of no return in Venezuela, where we either communicate now or we kill each other – and nobody wants to die.

How did you get beyond your own feelings of fear or anger to broaden your perspective on the subject matter?

The guys who play the kidnappers in the movie are all rappers. I originally thought of making a short and getting them to do the music, but they did this whole 35-minute improv for me and it was pretty obvious I had a movie. They started introducing me to the real kidnappers and I got to see the other side of the story, the rage in the ghetto. They also helped me get the dialogue into genuine street slang. It's a genuine collaboration between people from different walks of society.

Presumably the idea then was to pitch it at a broad audience in Venezuela?

Moviegoers in Venezuela are definitely Hollywood lovers, so the idea was to smuggle in this social commentary in such a way that nobody would object because they were having so much fun. They really don't want to hear any preaching. Caracas has the loudest cinemas in the world. It's like a fuckin' disco, man. It's loud, and so that's what the movie is too! But although it's Hollywood in form and structure, it couldn't be any less of a Hollywood story. The hero's a kidnapper and the cops are evil. It's a movie from a society where the values have somehow been reversed.

Did you get the reaction you expected?

We're the number one movie of all time in Venezuela, because people were coming out of the ghettos into the cinemas. The pirates agreed not to put it on DVD, since they supported the message of the movie. To be honest, I was convinced the Chavez government would embrace our message of social understanding and the economic elite would call us communists. What actually happened was the reverse. Why did the government attack us when all we're saying is that we have to improve the system?

What form did those attacks take?

Nothing's happened with the court cases so far. They're still open and they might simply remain so. They like to have you by the balls, but they don't want to be the government who sent a filmmaker to jail. So instead they had this really strong campaign against me and the movie on the state TV channel. There was a two-hour special taking the movie apart, using an illegal copy, but that's our government. And there were unfounded personal attacks: how could a Jew talk about the Venezuelan ghettos when Jews have no nation? It made me nervous, and it made my family nervous, because they made an open call for their followers to fight against me. I took some time out in LA just to let things cool down, but you can imagine how my 80-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, feels to hear some guy on the TV call her grandson a Jew.

Does that make you a victim of the film's success?

It's hard to see myself as a victim when the film means so much to people in Venezuela. I lost something, sure, but I'd do it again 20 times over. How many filmmakers get the chance to do something which really connects with their society? The problem is trying to follow it, because it's not very safe for me in Venezuela right now, and it's frustrating not to be able to make a film in my own country for political reasons.

'Secuestro Express' is out today.

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