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VIA: Nelson Gadelha

In 2001 there were 400 kidnappings in Sao Paulo. A new anti-kidnapping police division was set up in the same year.

Last year 60 people were kidnapped and while the police are catching increasing numbers of kidnappers, Atlalla believes the business of kidnapping will not go away.

You can watch the interview here

With: Humberto Paz, Horacio Paz, Jose Ibiapina de Souza.

(Portuguese dialogue)

Auds might feel they’ve been taken hostage during certain parts of “Sequestro (Kidnapping),” but Brazilian helmer Jorge W. Atalla’s docu is ultimately electrifying, both in what it reveals and how it reveals it. Fly-on-the-wall shooting offers a tutorial on how to get inside a story, from the hostage negotiations to the arrests and rescues performed by Sao Paulo’s Anti-Kidnapping Police Division, which Atalla followed for four-plus years, through myriad crises and confrontations. A feature version is reportedly in the works, but reality provides the magic of this “Sequestro,” set to open theatrically Sept. 10 in New York and Los Angeles.

Front-loaded with graphics, data and ominous music, the docu takes a bit of time in setting up its thesis, but the wait is worthwhile: With the collapse of the USSR and a cutoff of Soviet funding to leftist groups around the world, Marxist factions in South America increasingly resorted to kidnapping to raise money. Where the Brazilian government and others went wrong was incarcerating the perpetrators together with an apolitical and ruthless prison population. Those who had seen kidnapping as a political act — or even an “art,” as one veteran leftist says — instructed their less high-minded prison mates, sometimes under duress, on the finer points of for-profit abduction.

Kidnapping thus boomed in Sao Paulo, a city of 18 million people (and 500 kidnappings in 2000, when the anti-kidnap division was formed).

Atalla got the police department to cooperate with his film; he had to comply with their rules, which included the cops not being responsible for Atalla or his crew. The results are as intimate a look at crimefighting and resolution as one is likely to see in a docu, especially regarding the rescue of kidnap victims, with several of these moments captured live.

So are the arrests, which, as documented by Atalla’s fleet-footed cameraman, Arturo Querzoli, suggest a special episode of “Cops” as directed by Martin Scorsese. Sometimes, in fact, Atalla — and his invaluable editing team of Marcelo Moraes and Marcelo Bala — get overly baroque in their use of some already feverish crime footage. But this is balanced by Atalla’s interviews with kidnap victims, and the suggestion of the tedium that families are forced to contend with when one of their own goes missing.

Several cases are followed, with the narrative throughline being the abduction of Jose Ibiapina de Souza, who was held for 33 days, and whose case is updated throughout the film via the real-life phone calls made by the criminals to Ibiapina’s son, Alessandro. A kidnapper affecting a falsetto berates Alessandro Ibiapina with demands for more money than the young man can raise, threatening repeatedly to kill the father, to the great distress of his son.

Two of the film’s better moments are far less dramatic: One is an officer’s explanation of how one kidnap case was cracked — it’s standard police-procedural stuff, but it also offers the sort of look inside the investigate process the film could have used more of. The other moment is the very moving release of a traumatized hostage; he doesn’t seem to notice the cameras, but then, no one does: Atalla and his crew were either considered too insignificant to matter, given the high drama they were recording, or they pulled off some kind of a docu-disappearing act. Either way, the footage will ensure a captive audience.

Camera (color/B&W, HD); Arturo Querzoli; editors, Marcelo Moraes, Marcelo Bala; music, Tuta Aquino, Fernando Pinheiro, Vitor Rocha; sound, Emerson Rigoni, Manasses Marciano, Luiz Carlos Clemente Junior; associate producers, Felipe Barcelos, Ines Maciel Figueiro, Pablo Pessanha, Renata Reis. (In Los Angeles Latino Film Festival; 2009 Rio de Janeiro Film Festival.) Reviewed at William Morris Endeavor screening room, New York, Aug. 10, 2010. Running time: 94 MIN.

Read more: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117943321.html?categoryid=31&cs=1#ixzz0zA37rZvc

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Brazilian filmmaker Jorge W. Atalla begins with terrifying understatement: As we stare at a black screen, a kidnapper squawks threats at his victim’s family in a high-pitched fake voice that would be comic if the speaker weren’t threatening, “you’ll get your father back in pieces.” Atalla will follow this case through to its resolution, checking in with the frightened family during the film as they wait out the tedium of negotiation. We see first-hand how kidnappers terrorize the public by being in no hurry to name or receive their ransom.

Atalla gives us a bit of background on the phenomenon, with info-graphic titles and short interviews explaining how political shifts triggered this now apolitical crime wave. He also introduces us to some former victims, whose tales of spending up to three months in captivity are moving and scary.

But the meat of his film is the four years he spent with Sao Paulo’s anti-kidnapping squad, an impressively professional crew that gives calm advice to victim’s families and charges boldly into slums to find their loved ones. Atalla’s cameramen follow these raids like a “Cops” crew on much more dangerous ground, and they’re rewarded with stunning scenes: a young kidnapper being arrested while his devastated mother begs him to “say it’s not true”; a twentysomething victim who is so shocked to be rescued he seems on the verge of an on-camera seizure; a grisly dig to find the body of a victim who wasn’t so lucky.

Quick-paced editing never stays at one scene for long, although the film employs a couple of uneccessary effects to rev-up action footage. But the tempo does allow Atalla to squeeze many perspectives into a doc that’s barely an hour and a half, showing viewers just how much kidnapping has altered the psychological landscape in countries like Brazil.

Opened Friday, Sept. 10 (Paradigm Pictures)

Production companies: Yukon Filmworks, Midmix Entertainment in association with Filmland Intl. and Paradigm Pictures

Director: Jorge W. Atalla

Screenwriter: Atalla, Caio Cavechini

Executive producers: Christian Gudegast, Frederico Lapenda

Producers: Atalla, Alexandre Moreira Leite

Director of photography: Dario Dezem, Arturo Querzoli

Music: Tuta Aquino, Fernando Pinheiro, Vitor Rocha

Editors: Atalla, Marcelo Bala, Marcelo Moraes

No rating, 96 minutes

“Sequestro,” directed by Brazilian Jorge W. Atalla, is a daring documentary that takes the audience directly into the thick of the kidnapping scene in São Paulo- Brazil’s largest city with a population of 18 million. (Certainly a dynamic feat, as the city has one of the highest crime rates in the world). The filmmakers gained incredible access to follow the city’s Anti-Kidnapping Police Division which seems to be working over-time in order to solve the growing number of kidnapping cases in the city. During the four years that the filmmakers followed this division, 376 people were kidnapped in São Paulo- over 1500 in Brazil.

The film begins with a chilling phone conversation between a kidnapper and the son of the man they’ve abducted as they try to negotiate a ransom – this case will later become the main narrative line of the film. The fear and desperation in the son’s voice and the ruthless, artificially high-pitched shrieks of the perpetrator hit the viewer right away with the gravity of the crime.

Right after this sequence, we’re taken through a brief history of kidnapping in Latin America through a skillfully constructed graphic montage. The unwinding of events is fascinating. It all starts at the end of the Cold War when the leftist movements in Latin America lost their funding from the ex-Soviet Union. To be able to adjust to a new world order, a guerilla movement called “Departemento America” assembled a faction to commit kidnappings and raise money to finance Latin American Guerrillas. When the members of this group were imprisoned with common criminals – a mistake on the part of the Brazilian authorities – it created the perfect environment for the crime of kidnapping to spread. The inmates often asked the Marxists to teach them the techniques of extortion through kidnapping. What once was a “sacred job,” as one leftist reflects, became a common crime.

The filmmakers make use of several kidnapping cases – with the ages of the kidnapped ranging from six to eighty-two. But the main story line is the kidnapping of Jose Ibiapina. The filmmakers spend a lot of time with his family and the police as they go through tedious negotiations to free Ibiapina. But his story often gets interrupted with other cases and interviews. Juggling between too many characters and different narratives sometimes clashes with the flow and endangers the doc by losing impact and clarity. It’s easy to mistake one case with another and feel lost at certain parts which are never desirable, particularly in non-fiction cinema.

What “Sequestro” does especially well is to follow the action as intimately and bravely as possible. It’s like watching one of those delicious crime shows on cable, but directed with the poise and dedication of a surgeon. The film oozes adrenaline, thanks to the astounding work of the cameraman who effortlessly, boldly trails the police as they carry out their highly dangerous operations in São Paulo’s crime-ridden slums.

Though walking a fine line between reality show climax and exploitative melodrama, the film’s most powerful moments take place when the police free the captive in each case. To witness the bewilderment of the traumatized hostages at the moment of freedom heightens emotions, and yet doesn’t feel voyeuristic as this is a very private moment for the captives.

“Sequestro” is certainly a captivating exploration of the darker side of Brazil’s burgeoning world status. But what the film lacks the most is a thorough background on the social factors that are motivating the increasing number of kidnappings in Brazil. This may remind some dedicated followers of Brazilian cinema of a superb documentary, “Bus 174.” It was the perfectly put together story of a young man who held a bus hostage for 12 hours and threatened to shoot all of its passengers – a shocking event that has possibly left a mark on every Brazilian’s consciousness. By revealing the young man’s life story, through interviews with his family members and friends, and carefully laying out the motivating factors behind his aggressive actions, “Bus 174” made a perfect case for social inequality in Brazil.

Though “Sequestro” is a masterful, on the ground portrait of the kidnapping scene in São Paulo, it fails to add a deeper level of understanding to the incentives behind the crime; and for that it’s like reading a novel with the final chapter torn out.

Established in 2001,the Divisão Anti-Sequestro (DAS) is populated by officers who look alternately dedicated and exhausted. They’ve seen too many cases that turned out badly, but still, they expect to track down offenders and recover victims. The kidnappings evince no patterns, save for desperation: most of the perpetrators are poor, in pursuit of money to live on (one here asks for just $300 U.S.). Victims’ relatives take phone calls, demand proof of life, try to hang onto their fast-fading sense of coherence. For, the film suggests, the overriding effect of kidnapping is loss—of confidence, security, and logic—for individuals, families, and communities.

A timeline slides over the screen early in the film, with headlines and daunting numbers indicating the evolution of the industry (here deemed “Kidnapping, International”), the increasing numbers of people taken, ransoms paid paid, days in captivity. At first, the practice was overtly “political,” in the sense that guerrillas were looking to finance rebellions. But it appears that Brazil’s effort to repress the business in 2001, by putting the politically inclined offenders in prison alongside “common criminals,” led directly to a boom, as the common criminals learned how to commit kidnappings, and even started passing around how-to manuals. It wasn’t long before the numbers of cases surged, and the DAS became necessary.

The film’s focus on loss is rendered in numbers (during the four years of the film’s production, a title card tells you, 376 people were kidnapped in the state, and over 15,000 in nation), but also in vividly emotional displays. Recovered victims appear in interview frames, their backgrounds blank and their faces shadowed, some still visibly distraught as they recount their ordeals. But recordings of phone conversations are immediate and harrowing, sounding over black screens, voices pitched high and words grinding together. When the son of one victim cries that he can’t raise the amount of money requires, the kidnapper yells, “You’ll get your father back in pieces, you son of a bitch!” A cop adds, “Keep calm, trust us.” The relationships developed during each crisis—sometimes going on for weeks or months, sometimes done with, one way or another, quickly—are intense, difficult, and dramatic.

A former member of the Revolutionary Leftist Movement of Chile (MIR) convicted in the 1989 kidnapping of Brazilian mogul Abilio Diniz, Raimundo Roselio describes his thinking. Seated inside a cage, he explains, “Kidnapping is a kind of crime that defies the logic of pressure. There can be no pressure.” This seems right for the criminal with a sense of mission, whose ideal state is utter control—or the appearance of same. Now, however, the criminals seem less organized (several are picked up at home, roused in their underwear): they rely on hysteria and panic.

Moreover, the victims are always susceptible to pressure. Alessandro, son of the kidnapped José Ibiapina, seems the very embodiment of pressure, worrying and crying out. “You need to be strong,” says the officer. “It’s not wrong to get emotional,” he adds, “Sometimes it’s good. In fact, it can be detrimental to be too cold.” Alessandro’s face suggests he’s not quite ready to calculate a performance.

DAS inspector Rafael Correa Lodi, on the other hand, is adept, changing his tone and affect depending on each situation. Gentle with victims, cajoling or aggressive with criminals, he’s quick to adjust. “Outside,” he tells one offender whose associates remain at large, “You’re an animal. You get a gun and become an animal. Now you’re jerking me around, because your word is worth crap. That’s your problem: you’ve got bad partners.” The captured lawbreaker agrees, “These guys are sons of bitches.” Lodi’s made an inroad, maybe. And, he insists, “I want my victim freed.”

This attitude, that the cases belong to particular cops, helps to structure the film. While Officer Carlos Castigliani cautions, “You have to know how to separate the cop from the man and the friend of the family because you end up getting too involved,” the cops’ investments are visible throughout. The film invites you to feel along with them, the camera running along behind them in dark alleys and corridors (as in Cops) and a sentimental score accompanying the rescue of some victims. Still, some cases don’t end well: one of the interviewed victims describes her rape and her permanent dis-ease: “I can’t understand what goes on in the mind of a rapist,” she says, “More than violence, it’s subjugation, it destroys a person’s fabric. You feel guilty for having pleasured someone.” And a kidnapper remembers that “his” victim was killed. Though her ransom was paid, he says, “She saw me when I abducted her, she died, strangled in a chokehold,” as if he had no part in the murder.

The film frames these individual traumas with an insistent political and social critique. The industry is a function of poverty and hopelessness, the victims vulnerable and diverse. As Sequestro argues, solutions, like the problem, must be systemic.

There inside the station, headquarters to DAS (Divisão Anti-Sequestro), or Anti-Kidnapping Division, sat Dario Dezem patiently waiting. Wearing a DAS t-shirt, he may have appeared to be a policeman, but in fact he was the primary cameraman working on Jorge Atalla’s documentary Sequestro (Kidnapping). Living across the street from the station at a hotel for weeks, Dezem had been pining for a moment exactly like this. Even though he and Atalla had been shooting for more than three years and had countless hours of incredible footage, they felt the film lacked an important piece to Atalla’s intricate vision.

Before the grief-stricken Ibiapinas entered the room where they would be interviewed, Dezem quickly taped a microphone underneath the table and casually set his DV Cam down, aimed and recorded the unaware Ibiapinas.

Completing Sequestro, Atalla’s ambitious doc about kidnapping in São Paulo, would require other risks of far greater magnitude than the amateur subterfuge performed during the Ibiapinas’ first visit to DAS. It would take four grueling years before Atalla satisfactorily documented the large criminal tapestry made up of kidnappers, the abducted, victims’ families and police.

Long before Sequestro, Atalla, who studied filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, screened his first documentary, A Vida em Cana, in 2001 at a film festival in Miami. That same year, the kidnapping boom in São Paulo–over 300 reported cases–was grabbing headlines around the world. Considering his possibilities, Atalla thought he’d found his subject.

To film Cana, Atalla had lived with sugar cane workers for six months. So when he told a friend about examining kidnappings in his next film, Atalla’s friend asked him, “If for your first film you lived for six months with cane cutters, how are you going to do the same for a movie about kidnapping?”

“I really had no idea what we were doing in the beginning,” admits Atalla, who, battling continued resistance from his family for nearly three years of pre-production, had to keep his plans secret. Compounding matters, when his father’s health turned poor, Atalla became saddled with more responsibility overseeing the family business. Finally, he was a rookie filmmaker looking for financing.

Atalla, patient and resolved, eventually scaled these early obstacles within three years, only to have a bloated production team waste the first $200,000 in three months filming training exercises rather than real action. Shortly after the money was gone, Atalla lost his permit to shoot–something that would happen several more times.

In 2004 Atalla caught a break. He was introduced to Artur Dian, a hotshot inspector in DAS who, at the time of their introduction, was working around the clock with his team on ten kidnapping cases. Meeting Dian was pivotal, but utilizing that contact to move the production process forward took a while. “I spent a whole year with Artur learning everything I could about kidnapping before we were able to get the permits we needed to film with DAS,” says Atalla.

With permits finally in hand, Atalla and Dezem, now the sole cameraman, were told to stay out of the way when filming and to not expect DAS to spend much energy protecting them in the field. DAS advised the filmmakers, “If you hear shooting, duck.”

Years of negotiating the clearance to film DAS was one thing, but winning them over proved to be another. “They are very closed and worried about what information they leak out because they are always dealing with a human life, so they didn’t talk much [in the beginning],” says Atalla. “They didn’t make friends with me at all.”

From Jorge Atall’s Sequestro, which opens September 10 in New York and Los Angeles.

For inspector Rafael Correa Lodi, it was not until he was truly convinced of Atalla’s motives that he began loosening the tight reign he commanded. “I liked that [Atalla] envisioned a project that followed the day-to-day of DAS and would tell the whole story,” says Lodi. He recalls being forced to accommodate news crews that would swoop in for only a brief spell, usually during highly publicized cases, mining more for controversy than truth.

With greater access came increased peril. And the dummy police uniforms and flimsy bulletproof jackets Atalla and Dezem donned were little protection against the emotional tragedy and violence they encountered. They were in the thick of it, just what they’d been after, but the question was, Would they survive?

“Sometimes when we were filming it was like being in a non-ending terror action movie,” says Atalla, who was often away from home for two or three days at a time. And when he’d finally get home, he would be so full of adrenaline or anxiety from events he had witnessed, such as seeing a father handcuffed and hauled away from his wife and two sons, that he turned to sleeping pills.

Raids were by far the most intense aspect of the production process. The crew would have virtually no time to get ready because the DAS themselves would hardly spend any time prepping. “Unlike [in] the States, where floor plans can be acquired, [in the favela] it is impossible,” Rafael explains. “We can’t even cut the power and telephone lines.” When the DAS team identifies a potential safe house, they take less than a minute to equip before entering. No news travels faster in the favelas than the presence of police. The DAS’ goal is to get in the house and free the victim before the kidnappers have any idea what hit them. Where Sequestro excels are in those moments when the victims, who have been staring at death for days on end, tortured physically and emotionally, are instantly set free; they are overcome with joy.

After three long years interviewing victims and filming with DAS, both filmmakers were mentally fatigued. Dezem withdrew from friends and family. “I saw things I never imagined could even happen,” he recalls. “It was hard to separate myself from the cruelty I had witnessed.”Atalla longed for a vacation from the daunting task he had undergone. He wanted to spend time with his growing family. But even though his wife desperately hoped for the same, she knew, as did Atalla, that the film still lacked a key element.

Most of what he had were fragmented narratives, stops and starts with no beginning, middle and end. “We had always wanted to follow a family from the first day until the end,” says Atalla. Without a primary narrative that could see the movie through from start to finish, his film would fall flat.

Dezem began sleeping in a hotel across the street from the DAS station, hoping to be at the station at just the right time. Finally, after weeks of nothing, on a hot evening in January, Dezem was present when the Ibiapinas came to the station looking for help.

Initially against the idea completely, the Ibiapinas slowly came around and granted Dezem access to their home.

It was just what the film needed, but Dezem was ill-prepared for this new level of access. “They began treating me like a member of the family,” he explains. “I felt that the pain that the family was suffering, I was suffering too.”

During all this, in some unknown apartment, lying on the floor behind a sofa, with a hood over his head, was Jose Ibiapina. And that is where and how he stayed for 33 hellish days before a deal was eventually struck. His son Alessandro delivered all the money he had been able to raise to a designated drop-off point before going home to wait. After 24 hours with no word, a taxi driver finally called, saying that he had Jose crumpled up in his back seat unable to speak, but he was bringing him home.

Alessandro quickly called Lodi, whom Dezem happened to be dropping off for the day. Lodi then informed Dezem he had about five minutes to get over to the Ibiapinas. Dezem left Lodi immediately, speeding recklessly across town. He managed to pull up to the Ibiapinas’ home in the nick of time, hopping out of his car and aiming his camera just as Alessandro pulled his father from the taxi, embracing him joyously before rushing him inside.

Dezem was relieved to have gotten the pivotal footage necessary to wrap Sequestro properly, but more important, he was delighted to see Jose alive and reunited with his family.

As an observational film, Sequestro is a moving picture both emotionally and cinematically that avoids making assessments or critiques of its subject matter. This is a film about what victims of kidnappings endure and how they and their families cope during and after the ordeal. Atalla’s perseverance and honesty proved to be his greatest assets in making his film, enabling him to gain the trust and access necessary to capture such immediate and raw footage.

Sequestro opens September 10 in New York and Los Angeles through Yukon Filmworks, Midmix Entertainment, Filmland International and Paradigm Pictures.

R. T. Watson is a reporter and writer based in Los Angeles.

This is the world according to Sequestro, Jorge W. Atalla’s documentary about the large kidnapping business in São Paulo, Brazil, and the men and women who work to rescue their victims. Between 2005 and 2009 Atalla and his crew followed the Anti-Kidnapping Division of the São Paulo police department (Divisão Anti-Sequestro aka DAS) as they worked to rescue people.

Watching this film dispels any misconceptions you have about kidnapping. Being safe isn’t so much about being smart as being lucky. One victim was kidnapped when men in a police car pulled her over. Another man was kidnapped by six men from his office.

Kidnapping in São Paulo has its roots in the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the Soviets stopped sending money to leftist movements in Brazil organizations had to find new ways to fundraise, which led them to extortion. At the same time, it led to a culture of criminals who believed kidnapping innocent people served a greater purpose. Atalla takes the time to interview these criminals, many of whom are behind bars or have been recently released.

Atalla’s attention to detail is what makes the film so powerful. He interviews the victims and their families, the kidnappers and the DAS. He takes us inside the living rooms of families as they wait for the call from the kidnapper, demanding money the family can’t provide. He takes us into the homes of the DAS agents, with the wives who worry and miss their husbands. He takes us into the hole-in-the-ground hiding places where the DAS finally rescues people, or finds their bodies.

In the end, Sequestro is an uplifting movie – not in the sense that everything ends happily, but because it captures the indescribable joy the DAS brings to the rescued and their families so perfectly. For every victim who is rescued there is a happy reunion, a family restored, a life heading towards normalcy. To see a young man burst into tears when he realizes he’s been found and will be returned to his family is to see the purest, simplest form of ecstasy. These people, maybe for the first time in their lives, are happy just to be alive.

Sequestro (Spanish for kidnapping) doesn’t contort its material to fit a conveniently encouraging mold. The picture opens with slick graphics (the most overtly “produced” portion of the film) giving us a brief overview of the recent history of Latin American kidnapping as supplemental income for leftist guerrilla operations; then drops us in Sãu Paulo, Brazil, a city that, in 2000, was estimated to have investigated over 2000 official and unofficial kidnapping cases. The Sãu Paulo Anti-Kidnapping Division was created as a response, and, as of 2009, the “official” cases have been reduced to 70.

There is potential here for a film trafficking in falsely comforting uplift, an invitation to gloss over the despairing, chaotic life of an urban jungle (vividly captured) in favor of the heroism of the task force; and, while that is partially the drive of the film, director Jorge Atalla doesn’t allow you to forget the casualties, of both the intended victims and the enforcers. Sequestro has a simple structure that slowly overwhelms you—alternating between interviews with recovered kidnapping victims and footage of the Anti-Kidnapping division counseling families and coercing intelligence from underlings and raiding lairs of perpetrators.

Atalla doesn’t linger on the celebration of the recoveries; he moves to the next interview, the next raid, the next life-or-death dance of wills. The point arises: the fulfillment of the job is fleeting, enough to keep the team pushing forward to the next tragedy. The film, as organized, details dozens of cases, but they blur in your mind as a huge unending nightmare, an uncontainable, rampaging monster. Accepting the task force’s heroism as matter of fact ultimately does greater justice to the obsessions and sacrifices of these people, as they are allowed to be humans as opposed to objects for our admiration. Sequestro is terrifying and clear-headed.