Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) | |
---|---|
Directed by | Jason Kohn |
Produced by | Joey Frank Jason Kohn Jared Ian Goldman |
Cinematography | Heloísa Passos |
Edited by | Doug Abel Jenny Golden Andy Grieve |
Distributed by | City Lights Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 85 minutes |
Country | United States |
Languages | Portuguese English |
Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) is a 2007 American documentary film directed by Jason Kohn about corruption and kidnapping in Brazil.
Kohn has said "I really thought of Manda Bala as a non-fiction RoboCop depicting a very real, broken, and violent society." [1] It premiered January 20, 2007 at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary and the Excellence in Cinematography award. It had a limited release in North America beginning on August 17, 2007. On March 18, 2008, Manda Bala won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking at the inaugural Cinema Eye Honors.
Manda Bala sheds light on the corruption and class conflicts in Brazil through the experiences from different subjects, such as a businessman who bullet-proofs his cars; a plastic surgeon who reconstructs the ears of kidnap victims; former Governor and Senator Jáder Barbalho; a powerful Brazilian politician from the state of Pará who used a frog farm for money laundering, and the owner of the frog farm himself (see SUDAM).
This film details many of the reasons for Brazil's corruption including the fact that Brazil's politicians in office are exempt from civilian court proceedings, with the consequence that they will never be punished for crimes they commit in office. Another factor — and the other driving point of the film — is the ubiquity of kidnapping in Brazil, which ensures that the likelihood of redressing these crimes is fairly low and that someone's enemies (political or otherwise) are apt to disappear fairly easily.
As of May 12, 2008, the film had a score of 80% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 45 reviews. On Metacritic, the film had a score of 74 out of 100 based on 5 reviews. The movie was criticized by a Brazilian film critic, who thought that the violence was sensationalized. A scene where two kids where playing as kidnappers cutting off the ears of their abductees terrified the critic, making him asking the director about it. Kohn replied that he asked the children to do that, which prompted the critic Hudson Moura to think if the movie was just opportunist or it fails with "social ethics". [4]
Force Theory was a musical production team and performance art band from Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
The 2007 Sundance Film Festival ran from January 18 until January 28, 2007, in Park City, Utah with screenings in Salt Lake City, Utah and Ogden, Utah. It was the 23-rd iteration of the Sundance Film Festival. The opening night film was Chicago 10; the closing night film was Life Support.
Jader Fontenelle Barbalho is a Brazilian politician, businessman and landowner from the state of Pará. He is currently a member of the PMDB party and a Senator for Pará. He is the father of Hélder Barbalho, former mayor of Ananindeua, Pará and currently governor of this state. Also, he is the former husband of Federal Deputy Elcione Zahluth Barbalho.
Ellen Kuras is an American cinematographer of work includes narrative and documentary films, music videos and commercials in both the studio and independent worlds. One of few female members of the American Society of Cinematographers, she is a pioneer best known for her work in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). She has collaborated with directors such as Michel Gondry, Spike Lee, Sam Mendes, Jim Jarmusch, Rebecca Miller, Martin Scorsese and more. She is the three-time winner of the Award for Excellence in Dramatic Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival, for her films Personal Velocity: Three Portraits, Angela and Swoon, which was her first dramatic feature after getting her start in political documentaries.
Elizabeth Freya Garbus is an American documentary film director and producer. Notable documentaries Garbus has made are The Farm: Angola, USA,Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,Bobby Fischer Against the World,Love, Marilyn,What Happened, Miss Simone?, and Becoming Cousteau. She is co-founder and co-director of the New York City-based documentary film production company Story Syndicate.
Jess Weixler is an American actress. She played Dawn O'Keefe in the comedy horror film Teeth and Jordan in the comedy The Big Bad Swim.
Superintendência do Desenvolvimento da Amazônia is a local authority of the federal government of Brazil aiming to promote the development of the Amazon region by creating special financial and tax incentives.
Jonathan David Stack is an American documentary filmmaker. He is also a co-founder of World Vasectomy Day.
The Farm: Angola, USA is a 1998 award-winning documentary set in the notorious and largest American maximum-security prison, Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. Loosely based on articles published in Life Sentences, drawn from the prison magazine, The Angolite, the film was directed and produced by Jonathan Stack and Liz Garbus. Wilbert Rideau, a life prisoner who had been editor of the magazine since 1975, also participated in direction and was credited on the film.
The Cinema Eye Honors are awards recognizing excellence in nonfiction or documentary filmmaking and include awards for the disciplines of directing, producing, cinematography and editing. The awards are presented each January in New York and have been held since 2011 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. Cinema Eye was created to celebrate artistic craft in nonfiction filmmaking, addressing a perceived imbalance in the field where awards were given for social impact or importance of topic rather than artistic excellence.
Gasland is a 2010 American documentary film written and directed by Josh Fox. It focuses on communities in the United States where natural gas drilling activity was a concern and, specifically, on hydraulic fracturing ("fracking"), a method of stimulating production in otherwise impermeable rock. The film was a key mobilizer for the anti-fracking movement, and "brought the term 'hydraulic fracturing' into the nation's living rooms" according to The New York Times.
The 26th annual Sundance Film Festival was held from January 21, 2010 until January 31, 2010 in Park City, Utah.
Dylan Riis Verrechia is a Barthélemois award-winning film director, auteur, screenwriter, and producer. He grew up in Saint Barthélemy, French West Indies, and was bedridden at age 8 from severe ankylosing spondylitis for ten years. A graduate with honors of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Verrechia's movies have screened at film festivals around the world.
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is an American documentary filmmaker. She was the director, along with her husband, Jimmy Chin, for the film Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film profiled Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan in June 2017.
Jesse Moss is an American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer known for his cinéma vérité style. His 2014 film, The Overnighters, was shortlisted for best documentary feature at the Oscars. He has directed four independent, feature-length films, and three television documentaries and has produced 15 documentaries.
Jared Ian Goldman is an American film and television producer. He is known for his work on the Justin Timberlake starrer Palmer, Antonio Campos' adaptation of The Devil All the Time starring Tom Holland, the film adaptation of Shirley Jackson's masterpiece, We Have Always Lived in the Castle starring Taissa Farmiga, Alexandra Daddario, Sebastian Stan and Crispin Glover, Craig Johnson's Alex Strangelove, the Sundance hit Ingrid Goes West, the Sundance hit The Skeleton Twins, and the Academy Award-nominated Loving. He also produced the second season of The Punisher for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Other projects include Craig Johnson's adaptation of Daniel Clowes Wilson, Kill Your Darlings starring Daniel Radcliffe, Solitary Man starring Michael Douglas, Rob Reiner's And So It Goes starring Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton, The Wackness, and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning documentary Manda Bala .
The 2018 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 18 to January 28, 2018. The first lineup of competition films was announced on November 29, 2017.
Todd Douglas Miller is an American filmmaker known for directing the award-winning films Dinosaur 13 and Apollo 11.
This is the list of the winners of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for documentary features.