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Manda Bala (Send A Bullet)

Written by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

One on one interview with director Jason Kohn

A sweltering tropical city with 20 million residents, Sao Paulo possesses the largest population in the southern hemisphere. In the shadow of a simmering sun, the city falls into a huge gap of class distinction day by day. Even with the hopes men carry from a poor region, both can very easily be crushed by not finding work and ending up tragically, living in the slums.

A winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, "Manda Bala" depicts political corruption as seen through the growing violence of kidnapping. The film opens with a scene of a mannequin's head placed in a bulletproof glass box, then shattered by firearms, and quickly leads to a dog-eat-dog farm where, in the midst of a money-laundering scandal, shots metaphorically capture the current situation in this country, establishing its different tune right from the opening.

A young man is depicted being annoyed by the expense of bulletproofing his car, which protects himself from raging street violence. As this cautionary tale continues to unfold, a young woman who came from wealthy parents opens up about a kidnapping experience when she was 21 years old, in which her ears were sliced off and sent to her family as a ransom demand.

Director Jason Kohn lays out these unfortunate phenomena, then he  challenges viewers to stay focused on an eye-popping procedure by a pioneering plastic surgeon who operates a profitable practice by using cartilage removed from their ribs to attach the lost ears of kidnapping victims. At last, the crime-ridden city finds its deep-rooted problem in the person of corrupt congressman Jader Barballo, involved in multiple accounts of embezzlement--in some case easily exceeding $900 million in stolen property, and in the person of a fearless kidnapper who sees this predicament as a chance to get back at an unbalanced society.

Slowly, the human puzzle pieces fall into place, as director Jason Kohn gathers a series of scintillating connections and forms them into a driven conclusion, borrowing from the great documentarian Errol Morris(Jason was former assistant of his). He approaches the details with rich visual possibility by shooting in a film format. which is rare nowadays given the existence of low-budget digital filmmaking. He also places a translator by the side of the characters to make us feel right in the moment without captions.

After seeing the twisted legal system in which politicians are immune from prosecution. You wonder if a kidnapping ransom is a small price to pay in a politically corrupt world.

Directed by Jason Kohn
Director of photography: Heloisa Passos
Edited by Andy Grieve, Doug Abel and Jenny Golden
Produced by Jason Kohn, Jared Ian Goldman and Joey Frank
Released by City Lights Pictures.
Running time: 85 minutes.
This film is not rated.