Spring Break
Brandeis Alum wins top Sundance documentary award
by Kate Gardiner
Movies | 3/13/07
Posted online at 10:51 PM EST on 3/13/07
The winner of the Sundance Film Festival award for Best Documentary, Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) began with a mannequin waiting behind a piece of bulletproof glass, juxtaposed against scenes from a frog farm during its screening Thursday in Wasserman Cinematheque. It's mostly impressions, shot as if it were a traditional movie, on film and full of interesting camera angles; an aerial perspective on Sao Paulo really places us, though as foreigners we don't actually know where we are.
The viewers are introduced to the characters and their interpreters, sharing the screen with a wide perspective, the interpreter on the far left, the speaker on the right, talking in Portuguese and emphasizing perhaps the distance between the actual words and the translation. Director Jason Kohn '01 allows us to hear both, the Portuguese and the English, depending on the character, and the stage is set. The movie examines politics and corruption and frog farming and plastic surgery in Brazil, and crime as an industry, and poverty. It is really a movie-there is a plot, there is off-screen action, there is a bad-good guy and several tough good guys-and it is telling a true story.
Kohn said that he had two things before he started filming: an idea about frog farming and an idea about plastic surgery. The frogs are beautiful, green, beady eyes shining, by the hundreds in ponds everywhere. Some are alarmingly large; others, not so much. They are eating frogs, bred and marketed as such, bags and boxes full of them all over the film, finally breaded and fried and eaten by a Brazilian woman after we see the harvesting and the slaughter, the packaging and the shipping in huge quantities via air freight. The farm is beautiful yet industrial, set in what seems to be the countryside, somewhere outside Sao Paulo, where most of the action takes place.
Kohn's idea about the plastic surgery was then linked to the frog farms-the farms are used to launder dirty money from corrupt politicians, the money is held by a dramatically small number of rich individuals ; the rich cause the poverty because of the concentration, the poor rob and kidnap the rich and the middle class for money and ransom and the rich and middle class pay for the plastic surgeries required to replace ears chopped off as evidence provided by the kidnappers. The kidnappers then provide their children and extended families with food, clothing and shelter in the sweltering slums of Sao Paulo, which seem to extend right up to the doorsteps of the rich, and the circle closes when those children and those rich people eat the frog legs so thoughtfully packaged at the mass-production farms around the country.
The viewers are introduced to the characters and their interpreters, sharing the screen with a wide perspective, the interpreter on the far left, the speaker on the right, talking in Portuguese and emphasizing perhaps the distance between the actual words and the translation. Director Jason Kohn '01 allows us to hear both, the Portuguese and the English, depending on the character, and the stage is set. The movie examines politics and corruption and frog farming and plastic surgery in Brazil, and crime as an industry, and poverty. It is really a movie-there is a plot, there is off-screen action, there is a bad-good guy and several tough good guys-and it is telling a true story.
Kohn said that he had two things before he started filming: an idea about frog farming and an idea about plastic surgery. The frogs are beautiful, green, beady eyes shining, by the hundreds in ponds everywhere. Some are alarmingly large; others, not so much. They are eating frogs, bred and marketed as such, bags and boxes full of them all over the film, finally breaded and fried and eaten by a Brazilian woman after we see the harvesting and the slaughter, the packaging and the shipping in huge quantities via air freight. The farm is beautiful yet industrial, set in what seems to be the countryside, somewhere outside Sao Paulo, where most of the action takes place.
Kohn's idea about the plastic surgery was then linked to the frog farms-the farms are used to launder dirty money from corrupt politicians, the money is held by a dramatically small number of rich individuals ; the rich cause the poverty because of the concentration, the poor rob and kidnap the rich and the middle class for money and ransom and the rich and middle class pay for the plastic surgeries required to replace ears chopped off as evidence provided by the kidnappers. The kidnappers then provide their children and extended families with food, clothing and shelter in the sweltering slums of Sao Paulo, which seem to extend right up to the doorsteps of the rich, and the circle closes when those children and those rich people eat the frog legs so thoughtfully packaged at the mass-production farms around the country.
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