Bus 174 is the latest in a recent spate of high quality documentaries given international theatrical release. Like Touching the Void and Capturing the Friedmans, Jose Padilha's documentary deals with one specific event, using archive footage to generate a sense of immediacy and authenticity that fictional features by their nature cannot match. The film tells the story of a bus hijack that took place in the centre of Rio on June 12, 2000, and became a televised siege which brought the country to a halt.

Bus 174 involves two stories: the story of the siege itself, and the story of the hijacker, Sandro do Nascimento. The film intercuts siege footage with interviews with the participants and friends of Sandro, trying to understand the events that led to the hijack, and giving a broader sense of the deep-rooted social problems in Brazil. What emerges is a horrifying picture of a failing society, where the poor and helpless are entirely neglected by the state, and routinely brutalised by the police.

When I spoke with filmmaker Padilha, he said his desire to make the movie was fuelled by the one-dimensional portrait of Sandro that the media presented at the time. “My basic aim was to find out and tell the story of the hijacker because there was an amazing amount of coverage from the press and television at the time, but the coverage focused on the police and the Governor of Rio," Padilha declared. "They would say this crazy man hijacked the bus, as if that sentence would explain that person. I thought that Sandro was the most important person we needed to understand, and that perhaps by understanding his life story we would be able to understand a little bit about the origins of violence in a city like Rio, so I set out to make a film about him.”

The making of the film was complicated by hostility from the Brazilian authorities and the State Governor, as the film gives a shocking picture of police incompetence and brutality. The police were banned from speaking to Padilha, so the only policeman we see in the film wears a mask to protect his identity. There was also doubt throughout shooting whether or not the television companies would release their footage, a situation which was only resolved two months before the film’s release. Despite this hostility, the release of the film in Brazil produced a surprising reaction from the authorities. “I expected there to be arguments about it in the media," Padilha said. "But there weren’t any, because the film showed images that were proof of what it was stating, so my sense is that the police understood that. We say in Brazil that there are no arguments against facts, so the bottom line is that we didn’t get any complaints from the police. Instead they pretended it didn’t exist. For them it was better not to talk about it, not to create more discussion around the issue.”

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the film is its portrayal of the Brazilian streetkids, a growing population of homeless, mostly black, children and teenagers who, in the absence of any state support, are forced to beg or turn to crime. Padilha argues that this neglect of the underprivileged fuels Rio’s problems with drugs and violence. “I think what is true of Rio is also true of any big city in Brazil," he pointed out. "In Brazil there is a huge social class difference. There are lots of very poor people, and a small amount of amazingly rich people, and there is no way one can go from being poor to being rich, and this creates a lot of social tension and makes the situation unmanageable. And that’s not only true of Brazil, but I think Brazil is the worst case.”

Of course the fact that people will turn to crime rather than starve is hardly a revelation, but what elevates Bus 174 from the mundane is its investigation into Sandro’s specific motives for the bus hijack, and the deeper sense of social alienation that this generates. Padilha argues that the hijack can only have been partly motivated by money, because street robbers rarely target bus travellers, focussing instead on more lucrative targets. Instead, the film makes a compelling case that the hijack was a more emotional act, designed to capture attention, a desperate demand to be seen and recognised, in a society in which the street kids are largely invisible. Padilha explained, “When I watched the stock footage I realised that Sandro, who was my main character, had a turning point, because at the beginning of the hijack he was hiding his face, and then all of a sudden he decided to show his face and order the cameras around, so I had to explain why he changed his mind. Because of the huge presence of the media Sandro realised that he could overcome his invisibility, make the speeches that he wanted to make because he was being heard and I think that’s why he really went for it.”

This theme of invisibility culminates in a startling section of the film shot in one of Rio’s overcrowded juvenile prisons, in which the prisoners are shot in negative sepia, an effect which makes them look like ghosts, and removes all individuality. Padilha stated that this effect was initially borne of necessity, as the filmmakers had to disguise the children’s faces for legal reasons, but that they quickly realised that the technique would also allow them to make an expressive comment on the children’s situation. He added, “My initial idea was I would blur all the faces in the jail. But once I saw the stock footage with my editor, I thought maybe I should do a bigger effect so that I could convey the idea that we are entering a different world, so we tried different things, and eventually the negative sepia kind of thing was the one that I decided to use.”

Finally, I asked Padilha if he had any theory about why documentaries were generating so much interest of late. “I think what opened the eyes of theatrical distribution companies was Bowling for Columbine," he replied. "It made so much money that distributors started to realise that they could buy documentary films that are quite cheap compared to fictional films, and still generate good audiences. There is a particular audience that really likes documentary films. And the fact that after Bowling for Columbine other films, like Etre Et Avoir and Spellbound, were successful in theatres in other parts of the world, proves that this market is actually everywhere. A documentary has a way of conveying reality that is so much stronger than a fictional film. If someone dies in a fictional film it’s an actor pretending; if someone dies in a documentary someone has actually died.”

Padilha’s next project will be a drama, which he is currently in the process of writing, looking at Brazil’s violence and social divisions from the point of view of the police. Following the success of City of God, and the narrative tension and visual flair of Bus 174, it should be a film to look forward to.