Carandiru Movie: A South American Nightmare!

São Paulo – the richest city in South America, where an island of modern buildings not unlike New York’s share the land with a vast spread of misery, New Delhi-style – has a penitentiary that is the full opposite of any developed-world prison you might have seen in the movies. The first difference is the surroundings. At Carandiru, every cell is decorated with its own paintings on the walls. Saints, prayers, porn stars and soccer players cover every wall in an explosion of colour, like a samba parade or a slum dwelling.

Every convict at Carandiru, instead of following a unified standard has his own rights and advantages, according to his power within the group. While the weak are forced to share a 90 sq ft cell among 16 prisoners, the strong live in special suites.

What can and can’t be done and the punishment to be imposed in case of any transgression is not determined by the guards. The cellblock leaders – the prisoners with more skills and who can gather the largest number of allies, as if they lived in a state of permanent war – do that.

The freedom prisoners enjoy within the penitentiary and the fact that many areas in the prison are under their control are easy to explain. Under Brazilian law, Carandiru is not a penitentiary, but a detention house, a sort of entryway to the penal system, to which drug dealers, murderers and muggers who underwent no trial are sent while they expect a conviction. Since those men are not guilty, in the formal sense, they enjoy several privileges usually not available in prisons elsewhere.

A place such as this looks like fiction, but it is all true.

Carandiru, the new Hector Babenco movie, portrays life in a prison that was active up to 2002 in São Paulo. It was one of the biggest urban prison complexes worldwide – at its peak occupancy, Carandiru held 8,000 prisoners in a place designed for 3,000. The film is based on the experiences of Drauzio Varella, a physician who worked as a volunteer for 14 years in a cellblock occupied by 900 jailbirds.

To survive in this crowded environment, the prisoners had to create their own laws, and those were very often completely different from the State’s. In every prison worldwide, freedom is the main dream. But Carandiru was different: the dream, first of all, was getting out of there alive. This is why internal codes were so rigid:

• In cells where 17 prisoners dwell, using the toilet between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. is forbidden, due to the discomfort brought by the smell to those who sleep around it;
• Even under the most intense heat, prisoners must have their shirts on for meals; removing them is seen as bad manners;
• During visitation days, no prisoner is allowed to gaze at another man’s wife or girlfriend. When they see a woman, they usually bow their heads down to show respect.

The film tells the story of this place, almost as a documentary would. The production waited during eight months while a cellblock was emptied, so as to be able to shoot inside the penitentiary. While the film was under production, the other cellblocks still held 6,000 convicts. The movie crew used the same entrance employed by visitors and lawyers to gain access to the building. Only the cells’ interiors and the hallways were recreated in a studio.

The cellblock was released for shooting because São Paulo State government decided to tear down the prison in 2002 and turn its location into a park. Besides its medieval dungeon looks, Carandiru had became notorious internationally after 111 prisoners were slain by cops after a mutiny in 1992. Although the police claim to have acted in self-defense, no policeman was killed during the rebellion. Prisoners, on the other hand, were shot in the back and in the head, execution-style. The massacre of the 111 convicts came to reinforce the idea that an anachronism such as Carandiru had become unbearable, even for an unfair and unequal country like Brazil.