On the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, a car is riddled with bullet holes, some the size of a fist. You’d think it was a gangland shooting, but these bullets were fired by the police, and the passengers were unarmed teenagers. According to the desperate mothers in this disturbing documentary, the police have their own version of the story.
Police Killing begins with the stories of the mourning families contrasted with those of the military police, but it soon becomes more shocking as we see graphic footage of fatal shootings. Bleeding children plead for help, police put a pistol in the hand of a boy they have shot to death, and a heavily armed unit murders supposed drug dealers from a helicopter. Then there are the court cases in which the perpetrators twist the story to plead self-defense, claim they were merely following orders, or say government policy is to blame. They usually succeed. Figures show that over the past 20 years, more than 16,000 people have been killed in police operations. Police Killing is a piercing cry for justice.
Credits
Director
Natasha Neri, Lula Carvalho
Production
Bruno Arthur / Com Domínio Filmes
Executive producer
Lia Gandelman for Kino Filmes, Joana Nin
Cinematography
Lula Carvalho, Pedro Von Krüger
Editing
Marilia Moraes
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The Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner José Saramago was once sitting on the upper balcony of the opera, with a good view of the chandelier that looked so dazzling from the ground. From the balcony, he suddenly saw the true nature of the object, complete with cobwebs and dirt. It was a lesson he would never forget, he tells the directors João Jardim and Walter Carvalho, who took the subjective experience of seeing as the theme of their documentary. Wim Wenders again unfolds his obsession with watching and being blind: he argues in favour of spectacles, which unlike contact lenses frame the world. Wenders sees the benefits of this limitation. Neurologist Oliver Sacks stresses the importance of the imagination: people can deceive themselves into thinking that they see a magnetic field above an object with ‘the eyes of the mind’. Furthermore, Agnès Varda, Hanna Schygulla and a number of Brazilian writers, poets and musicians talk about their personal experiences with blindness and short-sightedness. For example, a blind bus passenger knows exactly where on the route he is at a given moment, because he knows the map of the area with all its bumps and turns by heart. Blindness, too, is relative: criticism is passed on the bombardment of images that is poured out at the contemporary viewer, leaving him behind senseless: ‘blind’
More infoIDFA history
2018
International Premiere
Frontlight
Frontlight