Manda Bala at MMI--Video Interview with Director Jason Kohn

I was at Sundance this year, and I kept hearing tremendous buzz about a little documentary called Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), which is screening this Saturday at 6:30 at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Here is a video interview with the director:



The interviewer, Reid Rosefelt, is a veteran publicist who helped launch the careers of such filmmakers as Pedro Almodovar and Jim Jarmusch. He wrote a lot more about the movie here, saying:

There are two basic strands to the story. One involves the super-violent world of kidnapping in Sao Paolo. We meet a woman who had both her ears cut off by kidnappers. It seems ear amputation is the preferred method of terrifying families into paying huge ransoms. There is a plastic surgeon that has developed a practice of reconstructing ears. A businessman relates that nearly every person of wealth has been a victim of crime or kidnapped. Some have been kidnapped more than once. Kidnapping is a booming business in Sao Paolo: it has the most bullet-proof cars, and the most private helicopters. Technologies.

The second part of MANDA BALA is about Jader Barbalho, Brazil's most powerful politician. It's really hard to think of too many people in the the world who are more outright evil than this man. Kim Jong-il? In a nutshell, he stole over two billion dollars from a public works project, thereby plunging the entire northeast of the country into starvation and death. I kept thinking, "what is he going to do with two billion dollars?" If he had considered stealing only one billion instead of two billion, it would have had a titanic impact on the ability of tens of thousands of people to survive.