Mandado

A few months before the 2014 World Cup, a search warrant authorizes the police to enter every home in two favelas in Rio de Janeiro. The documentary shows the radicalization of the Brazilian penal system and its consequences in the democratic crisis experienced by the country. In a little over an hour, the film showcases some of the most prominent legal experts in Brazilian Criminal Law and Criminology, as well as activists, journalists, and residents of the Maré favelas targeted by the warrant. Weaved with archival footage of the early years of Rio's favelas and animated documentation of legal proceedings, the interviews delineate the risks posed by the growing repressive apparatus of the Brazilian criminal justice structures. It is a history that begins with the global ambitions of the first Worker Party's governments - hosting events such as the World Cup and the Olympics and leading the UN intervention in Haiti - and reaches the far-right government that inherited both the military equipment and the regressive criminal justice policies that put in place to achieve those ambitions. Paraphrasing the words of the late photographer Bira Carvalho, a resident of Maré interviewed in the movie and one of many people involved in Mandado that have since died: it is a system designed to go wrong, but it's not wrong for those who designed it. The film premiered at the 55th Brasília Festival to reviews that criticized the film's formal rigidness while highlighting how it "raises a crucial issue for understanding the contrasts between the different 'Rios de Janeiro' experienced by hegemonic bodies and peripheral bodies."