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T H E B I G H O U S E
The police move in. In the ensuing massacre, 111 prisoners were killed; there were no police casualties.
carandiru
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HECTOR BABENCO’S CARANDIRU HAS PROVED ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL BRAZILIAN FILMS EVER ON ITS HOME TURF.
AS THIS OPERATIC SAGA OF PRISON LIFE GEARS UP FOR ITS INTERNATIONAL CAREER, NICK RODDICK EXAMINES ITS BACKGROUND.
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On December 8, 2002, Geraldo Alckmin, Governor of the State of São Paulo, pressed the button that would destroy forever one of the city’s most infamous institutions: the São Paulo House of Detention, known to everyone as Carandiru, after the area in which it stood.
It took precisely eight seconds for the three wings of the massive, 46-year-old building to be reduced to rubble. Brazilian director Hector Babenco and his crew were on hand to record the event, using eight cameras to capture as many aspects of its destruction as possible.
The footage they recorded provides the climax to Babenco’s powerhouse of a movie, also called Carandiru, which had its international premiere in Cannes this May, having already proved a spectacular success in its home territory.
Carandiru wasn’t like other prisons. Indeed, it wasn’t technically a prison at all: it was a ‘house of detention’, where those caught more or less in the act but theoretically awaiting trial were held, sometimes for decades. It was one of the largest single penal institutions in the world, designed to house 3,000 inmates. But, at the time at which the film is set, Carandiru was estimated to contain 8,000 prisoners.
INSIDE STORY
Above, The wedding of No Way (Gero Camilo) and Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro)
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The opening sequences of Babenco’s extraordinary film will confuse (and perhaps astonish) those with even the most basic experience of penal institutions elsewhere in the world. But then, the city is not much like anywhere else in the world. Anyone who has been struck by the extremes of wealth and poverty in Rio de Janeiro should take a look at São Paulo, 400 miles down the coast. The city centre is an ocean of wealth, with the steel and glass high-rise buildings of a modern metropolis. But up against them lap thousands of acres of slums. Not surprisingly, São Paulo has a high crime rate, which goes some way towards explaining Carandiru.
Essentially, the House of Detention was a self-governing society, run by the inmates. The guards kept the prisoners in - and granted admission to the occasional visitor, doctor, undertaker - and, in the film’s brutal climax, battalions of mounted police. Until the massacre of October 2, 1992, however, Carandiru had been a little microcosm of human society: day-to-day organisation, catering, the meting out of justice, who slept where and with whom - all was down to the inmates.
“Instead of exploding,” notes Babenco, whose fascination with this set-up was one of the triggers for the movie, “an overpopulated space eventually generates a rich experience of organised life. What we can see in the House of Detention is a meticulous, almost scientific, social organisation - a model of survival. I studied the subject in depth in order to shoot the film. I read about the life of apes and chimpanzees: they lack spoken language, but they organise themselves. What fascinated me was to learn that a place with three people is likely to generate violence on a scale of eight. But in a place with dozens of people this rate of violence drops to one.”
Not that Carandiru wasn’t violent at times: holding street criminals, rapists, drug dealers, pimps and petty thieves, it had a rigid set of rules, the breaking of which brought pretty much instant retribution.
The source for Babenco’s film is Estação Carandiru, a book written by a doctor, Dráuzio Varella, who spent 14 years working in the prison and found himself almost reinventing his medical knowledge, since the equipment was minimal. What is more, the AIDS epidemic was approaching its peak. Like Babenco, Varella was fascinated by Carandiru, staying longer there than he might have been expected to, and winning the trust of the inmates because of the straightforward way in which he treated them. But he is adamant that he neither took their side nor sentimentalised their plight.
“I attempted to avoid any kind of moral discussion throughout my book,” he says. “I really did control myself, and it was very hard. When I was writing it, I wasn’t interested in putting down what citizen Dráuzio Varella might think about those people: I was interested in the facts. Let the reader arrive at his or her own conclusions and judgements. No author should underestimate the reader’s intelligence. Whenever I’m reading a book and I see that the writer is trying to foist his or her opinions on me, I lose interest straight away.
The Doctor (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos) treats a patient
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“Why did I start working in the prison?” he continues. “Because I like criminals? No! I was brought up by an uncompromising Spaniard, my father, a completely honest man. He passed down strict values to me: I usually say that I owe him everything that I don’t possess. In other words, everything I didn’t earn by dishonest means, I owe to him and his principles of austerity and honesty. And, just like him, I hate crooks.”
What fascinated Varella most of all was the fact that, without any formal rule of law or any organised means of imposing the rules, life inside Carandiru worked on what might be called basic human principles - and this was the point at which Babenco really connected with the story.
“The doctor discovered that a man’s word is worth everything in there,” he says. “It’s all-important. The inmates create their own code for surviving together. It is an unwritten code, setting out rules of co-existence. They all know that you must respect other people’s visiting rights, never covet each other’s women, honour debts, never inform on a fellow inmate, and practice solidarity and selflessness towards others. Anyone failing to abide by these unwritten rules is punished severely.”
Given his history of films about the Brazilian underclass like the international art-house hit Pixote (1980) and his multiple-Oscar-nominated English-language debut, The Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1985 and also set in a prison), it was probably inevitable that Babenco and the Carandiru story would eventually come together. But it didn’t happen like that. Varella had been Babenco’s doctor for years, and had steered him through an almost fatal encounter with lymphatic cancer in the nineties. Varella had even showed him pages of the book as it was being written.
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