Tropa de Elite at the Berlin Film Festival

Late last year, I commented on Tropa de Elite, a fictional film based on real people that tried to look at corruption among one of the elite police force squads in Rio, the BOPE. What was really disturbing to me at the time was the insane heroization of BOPE among many sectors of society in the wake of the movie's official release. Many of my friends felt that the movie really did lend itself towards this kind of understanding of BOPE as heroic, rather than as a corrupt group of cops that murder civilians at random without any consequences whatsoever. These people (many of whom attended college) kept comparing Tropa de Elite to City of God, a movie that looks at violence in one of Rio's favelas from the 1960s to 1980s. Many of the criticisms of Tropa de Elite, from their point of view, were the same as the criticisms that they had of Cidade de Deus - that it glorified violence, it didn't adequately address the social circumstances that led to the favelas, that it wasn't critical enough of Brazilian society, etc.

I found these parallels intriguing at the time, but not worth really mentioning. Everybody I know who isn't from Brazil (including myself) thought City of God was a great film, both technically and narratively. While I was open to the criticisms Brazilians had, I completely disagreed (and, in a barely-related aside, Crash seemed to be my City of God - I pure, straight, hated that movie to the point of wanting that 2 hours of my life back, yet Brazilians absolutely adored it. The joint-theory between my self and people I talked to was how different such movies look from inside a culture as opposed to outside it). Given the way that Brazilians were comparing Tropa de Elite to City of God, I wondered if, and half-hypothesized, that Tropa de Elite would be far more warmly received in an international context, where people saw the violence for what it was, and neither heroized BOPE or knew enough of Brazil's complex social conditions to issue a strong criticism of what the movie didn't do, in the same way that had happened with international reception of City of God.

While my hypothesis is far from proven, yesterday, Tropa de Elite won the coveted Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, becoming only the second Brazilian film to do so (Central Station, a great movie that offers some wonderful portrayals of Brazil's interior and local religious and cultural expressions in Brazil, was the first, 10 years ago - if you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it strongly enough). While this could mean nothing, the fact that it won such a well-regarded award in the international film world will probably mean greater chances for release in the U.S. and Europe, on DVD if not in the theaters. I'm willing to openly wager that its reception abroad will be far different from its reception in Brazil. It will be curious to see if and how this develops.