Geography, resources and capital promise Brazil major-player status on the world stage. Beneath its PR image of samba and soccer, beaches and babes, however, is a sinister socioeconomic reality that films have begun to expose and export, most recent of which is Manda Bala/Send a Bullet.

American’s filmmakers have long fostered a picture of Wild West and urban bloodletting that, cartoonish as it becomes, forms a considerable slice of this country’s image abroad. The upsurge in the Southern Hemisphere’s counterpart is all the more distressing in that the brutal reality pictured is if anything partial or understated. With two co-producer college friends, extremely young Errol Morris graduate and New Yorker Jason Kohn spent five years on this his first film, a Sundance 2007 best documentary jury prize-winner which proudly proclaims itself “A film that cannot be shown in Brazil.”

With concentration on a few individual cases through “the same visual language as a fictional film,” the thesis is explored that vast potential wealth, rampant corruption, and lack of any justice or buffering middle class, all lead to a crisis situation in which two groups prey on each other and terrorize the state. That is, on the one hand the politicians and the wealthy who take advantage of a skewed system to enrich and protect themselves and, on the other, the urban poverty-stricken who take to physical violence to survive and get back their own. So pervasive has the struggle grown, that entire industries have sprouted to cater to both these extremes.

Pure accessibility, it would seem, dictates that more camera time is devoted to the former, the uber-group of the monied and powerful and their minions. Along with security issues like bullet-proofing luxury automobiles, instruction in anti-terrorist roadway maneuvers, helicopter services and implantation of global positioning chips, as a deeply involved metaphor for those on top, the story frequently turns to evasive smiling Diniz and his frog farm widely said to be a money-laundering front.

The most direct but by no means only connection is Jader Barbalho, once so poor he didn’t have taxi fare but today immensely rich, owner of northern Pará state’s newspapers and radio station, on-and-off senator (hence immune from prosecution) and dispenser of many billions through suspect development agency SUDAM. Seen in unflattering news footage before one brief late interview (where he notes that the poor vote him in), the controversial politician is dogged by also interviewed district attorneys, assistants, civil lawyers and police marshals.

The state of affairs has bred a lucrative, bloody trade in kidnapping for money, and others frequently interviewed on the upside of society include fearful entrepreneur Mr. M., several of four score armed and bullet-scarred detectives from São Paulo’s anti-kidnapping DEAS unit, ransomed victim Patricia whose ears were cut off and mailed to her family, and oily Dr. Juares Avelar, who has prospered by surgically rebuilding ears.

There are unpleasant shots of plastic surgery and frog skinning, appalling videos of pleading kidnap victims and of ears being sliced off. Most disconcerting of all, the reverse of the appropriate metaphor of the coin, is a number of late interviews with Magrinho. Bad teeth made more sinister in a ski mask, the bank robber-turned-kidnapper impassively details the trade like a kid recounting some escapade. The rest of his gang northern country boys, he is the only ghetto native, but Robin Hoodish talk of helping neighbors appears a poor afterthought. Given his occupation, there is chilling irony in the shrugged joke that, with nine children of his own and another on the way, he “can’t stop, right? Maybe one will become president of the country.”

While the concerns of Manda Bala are admirable, however, its necessarily selective reality in eighty-five minutes is so far from almost any viewer’s conceivable experience as to verge on caricature, and the experiment of on-screen translators is interesting but defeated by its choices, e.g., Dr. Avelar’s steps out of Grant Wood, while, translating into Portuguese, Patricia’s wistful sidekick gives the impression she would prefer to be anywhere but here. Such tics, and the cutting back and forth among people who come across as rather oddball, make too many defects that overwhelm the film’s virtues. 

(Released by City Lights Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)