Bus 174

An intense, troubling, engrossing documentary from the streets of Rio de Janeiro, pieced together from TV news footage and interviews, about the hijacking of a downtown bus by one of the city's drug-dependent street kids, on 12 June 2000. Sandro do Nascimento had been living rough since the age of six, when he'd seen his mother stabbed before his eyes. Later, he survived the horrors of Brazil's jails and the butchering of his friends at the hands of the police. Now breaking news on all Brazil's TV stations, he tries to parlay a gun and a handful of innocent lives into some kind of settlement. Slightly overlong for overseas audiences, José Padilha's film (co-directed by editor Felipe Lacerda) makes it crystal clear why this incident proved so traumatic for many Brazilians.