Brazil on Monday gave a warm welcome home to the director and crew of "The Elite Squad," a hyper-violent film that on the weekend picked up the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
The triumph on the movie's first foreign outing augured well for its worldwide release over the coming months, media said, with distributors now lining up to get it into cinemas.
Director Jose Padilha is reportedly also being courted by Hollywood.
One major daily, O Estado de S. Paulo, said the Golden Bear the movie picked up "was a beautiful victory for Brazil and for Latin America."
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hailed its "extraordinary qualities" and told O Globo newspaper it would "show the world that Brazil is not only a country with a bad side -- Brazil has bad things, Brazil has good things, just like any other country in the world."
Titled "Tropa de Elite" in Portuguese, the film propels the very real war between police and criminal gangs in Rio de Janeiro's slums onto the big screen.
Action and pithy dialogue run through the kinetic expose of police corruption and the gory conflicts, which include cops torturing a gang member by asphyxiating him with a plastic bag, and one crime victim being torched to death in a cocoon of car tires.
Some critics lamented what they saw as a glorification of police brutality, with the trade mag Variety dismissing the movie as a "recruitment film for fascist thugs."
Padilha, looking happy but tired after his 20-hour return flight Sunday, rejected that view, saying his work was meant to show the nefarious influence dealing in violence had on Brazilian police and their ideals.
The movie, he said, "talks about the real things we see daily, the lack of security in our daily lives, as well as putting it in relation with our own police," the news site Globo reported.
No comments:
Post a Comment