«Criminals
in uniform, with well-paid jobs, took the life of my son ", says a mother who
mourns the teenage son, killed by Brazil's militarized police, to one
group of other poor, black women during a public demonstration.
"If the state did not accept the killing of the police, they would not do it. The
is the fault of the state ", says another mother. A father, about an incident that left five
young men died, in a car pierced by bullets: «How do you explain over 100
shots – and that all the victims were shot in the back? "
Police Killing – which had its international premiere during the screening in IDFA's Frontlight section – is a forensically detailed condemnation of the thousands of unpunished killings that have been proven by the police in Brazil's megaby Rio de Janeiro every year. The film is made by directors Natasha Leri and Lula Carvalho.
It opens with
recording of a public prosecutor reconstructing the killings of five young men -
between 16 and 21 years old – in Rio's poor Costa Barros favela in November 2015. Police Killing er
structured as a lawyer's review of a case; grunts patiently put together
to tell the stories of a handful of the 16 deaths that are
caused by the police in Rio over the last two decades.
Exposed wrong
Hearing images from police body cameras, footage from dashboards, mobile recordings from witnesses, and other sources, place viewers in the midst of fateful encounters where police first shoot and ask for – or turn raw jokes about, the limping and bloody bodies of their victims.
The film is built around some of the few cases that come to court, a public interrogation where police chiefs and politicians verbally dismiss the dead as "low-level scum", and the public protests of the victims' relatives. It strives to present both sides of the story, but it is nevertheless clear that the goal is to expose the injustice in a system that gives the blab in the lives of the poor, black boys who are trying to live a kind of life in the favela.
Police are thugs who know they can kill without being punished.
Only two percent of reported incidents – including the 1124 deaths in 2017 and 154. . .
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