Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite)
Film screening will be followed by a panel discussion with director José
Padilha and scholars José Gatti and James Cavallaro.
Date: Monday, May 5, 2008
Time: 7:00 pm
Location: Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge
Presented with the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at
HKS, The Harvard Film Archive, and the Harvard University Brazil Studies
Program at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Fore More Information:
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2008mayjune/elite.html
Synopsis:
Elite Squad has been a media event in Brazil since the first pirated
copies of the workprint started circulating. It was an instant success
upon its Brazilian release last fall and burst onto the international
scene by winning top prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. The film
is an adaptation of a book by the same name written by anthropologist
Luiz Eduardo Soares (the former national secretary of public security in
Brazil) and two police officers, André Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel. The
book recounts the experiences of Batista and Pimentel as officers in the
Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, the Special Police Operations
Battalion of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police. Soares is the former
national secretary of public security in Brazil. Both the film and the
book show police brutality and corruption, as well as the violence of
drug traffickers, through the eyes and the voice of a policeman involved
in a world where the war on crime itself becomes criminal.
--
Marcio Siwi
Fellow / Program Officer
Brazil Studies Program
Harvard University
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
1730 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
tel (617) 495-5435
http://drclas.harvard.edu/brazil