Hi guys, yesterday I've finished watching the movie "Tropa de Elite", a new brazilian movie just released a couple of days ago. This movie created such a comotion even before been released, been so by far the most copied (brazilian) movie in brazil. Because of this the movie was re-scheduled to the 5th of October instead of 2th, the original schedule.The movie is a story based on real facts about the BOPE, in english "Especial Operations Police Battalion", a special police of Rio de Janeiro city. It shows the cruel reality of the poverty in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where the criminality and drug dealing goes along (and well) with the police, that by getting such a small salary almost always end up getting corrupted. The BOPE isn't like that (at least in the movie), and it's feared by the other kinds of police and the criminals in the favelas, giving a hope that not all police would be corrupt. But this special operations group also show a different view that seems to be more and more accepted by the society, not that this movie created, but just made it brought it up: the acceptance of the rule of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" (Hammurabi's law). As the brazilian people see their corrupt politicians (pleonasm?) not been punished, the drug dealers commanding the favelas and the police charging to do their work, people start to accept this radical way of solving things.
Following is the first 7 minutes of the movie, with subtitles in English. Some weird translations here and there : )
Before anything I would like to highlight that the reality shown in this movie is NOT what you will see everywhere in Brazil. Even in Rio de Janeiro, apart if you really look for trouble, you won't see things that happen in this movie, as police and criminals going around shooting randomly.
The danger of movies that explore the extremes of Brazil's poverty and criminality like "City of God" or now "Tropa de Elite" is that people will create this stereotype that Brazil is just that everywhere. I lost count of how many times people told me in Europe: "Are you brazilian? Ahhh, I've seen 'City of God', is it really like that? ". At least it doesn't go the the extremes as the movie "Tourists", which shows americans and british tourists been kidnapped and having their organs taken alive... Really something I've NEVER heard about....
People don't know that for example, in the south of Brazil we have places that you would just feel like being in Germany, from the architecture or even from the language in some places. Blumenau, for example, a city founded by Germanic immigrants, 140 kms from my city Florianopolis, has an Oktoberfest every year, that is one of the biggest parties in Brazil.
People outside Brazil use to have a stereotype of brazilian been people that just know how to play football and dance samba. I hope I had done my job so far of showing to people in Europe that Brazil and brazilian people has much more to offer than only this.
To finish, the official trailer of the movie, unfortunately only in portuguese:
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