The Prisional System Professor F. Favero, aka Detention House, aka Carandiru, or Carandiru Complex was going to be demolished in 2002. Then started a national rush to cover as much as possible of this incredible (on the bad side) place.
Carandiru Complex was made of 9 pavillions, each one with 5 floors, where no guards/wardens could enter and go up. Made to receive about 4,000 inmates, it once held 9,000, and by the time of the demolition had 7,000. The building was falling apart.
Famous by the massacre of 1992 (111 inmates executed), nicely portrait by Babenco's 2003 movie(Carandiru), the documentary is a compilation of more than 170 hours of footage recorded by the inmates themselves, who were given 20 DV cameras and a video workshop.
How can you control 7,000 people (killers, drug-dealers, robbers, stealers, rapists, transvestites, innocents maybe) with almost no money and less than hundred wardens? The inmates had their own rules, and the simple one: you do something wrong, you die. This is how they could make people, who had once break the rules, to obey rules. And it is an incredible environmet: transvestites, crack, marijuana, bosses, evangelics, etc..., all in the same place.
The documentary is slow at times, but it never gets out of a trilling pace. The inmates tried to focus on dreams and hope, instead of murders and past stories. Of course the camera work is at times shaky, and confusing, but the editor perfectly could arrange the 170 hours in 2, getting the "best" of Carandiru.
To everyone that is completely bored of happy-ending blockbusters movie. It is not a depressing movie at all, but you will never get a happy ending. Watch it!
