JosePadilha Tagged Articles at Cinematical

At the rate Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha (Tropa de Elite) is becoming attached to projects, I might need to start another annex called Cinematical Padilha. Earlier this week, I posted info about his latest documentary, Garapa, and prior to that I had written about his transfer to Hollywood for a South America-set action movie formerly (and maybe again?) called A Willing Patriot. Of course, I don't mind writing so much about the guy; Padilha is one of the most exciting new talents, and it's cool to see his career exploding.

Today's Padilha news is that he'll be writing and directing the based-on-a-true-story drama Marching Powder. Again, this one's set in South America (good to see a foreign filmmaker making such a gradual move to Hollywood), and if it sounds familiar, that's because we've seen Don Cheadle linked to it for awhile. The Oscar-nominated actor will reportedly still produce (along with Brad Pitt and others) and star as a British drug dealer serving time in a Bolivian prison, of which he eventually gives illegal tours to travelers (he became popular enough to be featured in Lonely Planet guides).

The movie will be based on the book "Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine and South America's Strangest Jail" by Thomas McFadden (the British drug dealer) and Rusty Young, who apparently found the story by signing on for one of the prison tours.

Two months ago, I brought word that Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha is moving on up to Hollywood, but now comes word that he has first squeezed in a new documentary. The film is titled Garapa, and like both his brilliant debut, Bus 174, and his recent Golden Bear-winning follow-up, Tropa de Elite, it deals with social problems affecting his homeland. This time, he traveled to the poverty-stricken northeast, where he documented three families struggling to feed themselves, despite the nation's current economic boom and seemingly successful welfare program. Garapa was also shot in black and white with hand-held cameras and features no music score, to keep things simple and straightforward. It can't be said, though, that Padilha went for a non-intrusive style, and he admits that during and since the shoot, he's been compelled to assist the families directly.

Considering Bus 174 is one of the boldest, most powerful documentaries of the past 10 years, it's good to see Padilha returning to the documentary genre. The controversially divisive Tropa de Elite (which Cinematical reviewed at Tribeca and which will receive a day-and-date release this September) was still non-fiction, but it was a dramatization. When it was announced that he had been wooed to make a studio-produced action film, I was as disappointed as I was excited. Fortunately, he's keeping the documentary thing going simultaneously, and he's even already working on his next doc, which will be about the Yanomami Indians, natives of the Amazon rainforest who were previously unappealingly fictionalized in the exploitation film Cannibal Holocaust.

Another Brazilian filmmaker leaves the favelas behind and moves to Hollywood: The Hollywood Reporter reports that acclaimed yet controversial writer-director José Padilha will make an action movie, appropriately set in South America, for Warner Bros. Hardly a stranger to the genre, Padilha recently picked up the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival for his critically divisive Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), a semi-fictional action thriller about police corruption in Rio de Janeiro. Our own Scott Weinberg, reviewing from Tribeca, called the film "powerfully gritty, slyly engrossing and unapologetically brutal." Prior to that film, Padilha made the brilliantly kinetic documentary Bus 174, which was one of my favorite releases of 2003.

The new project is currently without a name, but the original title was A Willing Patriot. Scripted by Jason Keller (who wrote the 2002 fX TV-movie Big Shot: Confessions of a Campus Bookie), the movie will be about an American federal agent who goes undercover in South America's "Triple Frontier" (the dangerous tri-border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay) to break up a terrorist-funding network. Producer Gianni Nunnari (The Departed, 300), who did the hiring of Padilha, apparently referred to the film's setting as "a modern-day Dodge City." The next step for Nunnari and fellow producers Darin Friedman and Guymon Casady (The Final Cut) is to cast a major Hollywood actor and a major Latino actor.

The name is Rio, but in José Padilha's Elite Squad, it doesn't look like anyone's dancing. The city has been the source of ever-increasing crime, and this turmoil has inspired the director to film an action movie that digs into Rio's underworld. Elite, said to be based on facts, is about a special forces operative who is fighting against Rio's drug gangs, but it isn't a simple case of crime and punishment. The movie includes graphic scenes of torture and execution, which have spurned unrest by Rio's officers, and found itself in a flurry of pirating, as thousands of copies have hit the streets before the film even gets released -- according to The Guardian.

Rio police tried to ban the film from cinemas, but it was backed by the judge who rejected the case, saying that the feature portrayed the "day-to-day reality of a good part of the people living in this city," and even Rio's governor, Sergio Cabral said that it is "faithful in uncovering the serious problems that we face in terms of public security." The city's problems have spurred Bope, the Special Police Operations Battalion to battle the city's enemies "at whatever cost," and in the film, this includes executing drug traffickers with a rifle shot to the head. Obviously, this isn't the feel-good story of the year, but something that'll probably weigh on moviegoers for a long time when it premieres next month in Brazil. Padilha hopes that "people will watch this and say: 'Hell, we have to change these rules. We hope to generate a debate.'" Now we'll have to wait and see if the film gets overseas distribution, and what sort of debate it inspires for world-wide audiences in the wake of Abu Gharib.