MANDA BALA: Brazil’s Corruption, Kidnappings, and Frogs
by Andre Soares
When I read the synopsis of Jason Kohn’s Manda Bala / Send a Bullet in the Sundance Film Festival independent film - documentary list – “In Brazil, known as one of the world’s most corrupt and violent countries, Manda Bala follows a politician who uses a frog farm to steal billions of dollars, a wealthy businessman who spends a small fortune bulletproofing his cars, and a plastic surgeon who reconstructs the ears of mutilated kidnapping victims” — I thought the film sounded like supermarket tabloid trash.
Not helping matters was reading Mary Milliken’s Reuters article on Manda Bala, in which she asserts that there’s “a boom in ear-reconstruction surgeries” in Brazil as a result of the fact that “gangs from the teeming [São Paulo] slums often cut off their victims’ ears to pressure families to pay ransom.”
Now, according to Brazilians (including a physician) I spoke with on the phone there’s no ear-reconstruction boom in that country, and although mutilations have indeed occurred in kidnapping cases, those are quite rare. (I found precious little online on the subject, and most of the dozen or so articles I read revolved around a fictitious mutilation case. If chopping off kidnapping victims’ ears were truly routine in Brazil, I believe it’s fair to say that there would be much more information available.)
Worse yet was reading in IndieWIRE Kohn’s statement that he envisioned his documentary on personal tragedies set in a far-away land “as a non-fiction RoboCop depicting a very real broken and violent society,” while in The Reeler he says he wanted his documentary on corruption and kidnappings “to be an entertaining movie.” (Kohn, by the way, is a former research assistant to Errol Morris, who has given generous praise to Manda Bala.)
Kohn has also ridiculed Brazilians who’ve questioned his approach to the subject matter. "There is a very typical Brazilian response that I have encountered in the past five years making the movie," Kohn says in the Reuters article. "’Why are you talking bad about my country?’"
Whether the New York-based filmmaker’s Portuguese is as pidgin-ish as the English of those Brazilians he’s encountered I have no idea — though I assume his mother, who is from Brazil, speaks better English than that. Either way, if reports on the film — whether positive or negative — are accurate, Manda Bala sounds not only dated but also quite simple-minded.
For instance, corruption in Brazil — if such a thing can actually be measured — shows no signs of having abated in the last decade, but the homicide rate in São Paulo has dropped by more than 50% since 1999. (See Veja — a sort of Time magazine of Brazil — and Comunidade Segura; both articles are in Portuguese.)
Although a link between political corruption and social violence is undeniable — one good example would be the billions of US reconstruction dollars that have never reached the Iraqi population — in Brazil’s lopsided society there are clearly numerous other factors at work, including the fact that the country has one of the planet’s worst gaps between rich and poor. (Kohn does mention that in his IndieWIRE interview.)
Also at IndieWIRE, Steve Ramos praises Manda Bala for making “the powerful case that increasing violence [sic] and political corruption sum up the South American nation today,” though the New York Sun’s Darrell Hartman criticizes the documentary for seeming “a bit too proud of its Rubik’s Cube complexity. It also suffers from Tarantino syndrome: The jazzy soundtrack drowns out a woman who lost an ear, and the carefully maintained color scheme of bright blue, green, and yellow seems downright insensitive alongside grainy footage of blindfolded kidnapping victims who fear for their lives.”
The only Brazilian review I was able to find of Manda Bala was written by Myra and Carlos Brandão in a film blog for the Rio daily O Globo. In their assessment of Manda Bala, the Brandão couple state that the documentary’s biggest flaw lies in the “tiresome repetitiveness of the same characters, reducing the director’s arguments to the replaying of the same corruption case, [and] to speeches made by criminals, by a kidnapping and mutilation victim, and by a none too convincing yuppie who drives an armored Porsche.”
In any case, the five-member Independent Film Competition jury for documentaries clearly found Manda Bala anything but repetitious or simple-minded for the documentary won top honors at Sundance. The color scheme didn’t bother jury members, either, as Heloísa Passos was given the best cinematography award in the documentary category.
Considering what I’ve read about Manda Bala, both the hosannas and the complaints, I remain highly skeptical. Of course, the only way I’ll know for sure if I’m right or wrong — or somewhere in between — is to actually watch the film. As of Jan. 28, however, it still hadn’t been sold though I assume that at the very worst it’ll find its way onto the Sundance Channel.
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