On Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, I remember arriving at the office building I worked in near Times Square (after a nail-biter of a subway ride over the Manhattan Bridge) and noticing next to the front door a man selling photographs of the Twin Towers in flames for $5 apiece. At first I was stunned by his callousness, but by the time I got by the guards conducting full body-cavity searches in our lobby, I’d decided that a man profiting off of one of the worst tragedies in American history not 24 hours after it had occurred was actually proof that we were going to be all right: Al Qaeda might scare the hell out of us, I thought; but they’ll never take away our drive to make a dollar. I felt a similar ambivalent rush of pride in humanity’s mercenary perseverance watching Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), a documentary about the kidnapping epidemic plaguing the poverty-stricken Brazilian city of São Paulo, population 20 million. Despite the fact that the city averages a kidnapping a day and that many of those taken end up maimed or dead or worse, enterprising minds have managed to turn this enormous lemon grove into a profitable beverage stand. They sell bulletproof cars and private helicopters; they invest in tech companies looking to implant tracking microchips under human skin; they open plastic-surgery clinics that cater to abductees whose ears or fingers turned out to be the cost of doing business in a lawless society. All in all, it’s a booming economy that rewards both the rich who prey on the poor and the poor who prey on the rich, and first-time director Kohn has a keen researcher’s eye for the way corruption spreads out and down from those with power and money to those with neither. Though Manda Bala may rely too heavily on interviews with government officials and civil attorneys to get its point across, and therefore lack the kind of visual, visceral wallop you’d hope for from a documentary about a city on the edge, a few moments will knock the wind right out of you: grainy video footage of victims tied up in dingy apartments, in particular, and an interview with an unrepentant professional kidnapper whose ski mask and Robin Hood pretensions can’t disguise the presence of a terrifyingly dead soul.
This article appears in December 7 • 2007.