“Elite Squad”, a much-hyped film about Rio's special forces police (BOPE) was officially released on Oct. 12. The peculiar thing about this release is that an estimated crowd of 3.5 million people have already seen it before its debut. The [unauthorized] copy of the film can be viewed or downloaded from many different places on the web, and the speculation is that more than a million copies of the DVD have been sold on Brazilian streets across the past few weeks.
‘Tropa de Elite', by Brazilian director Jose Padilha, has turned into the most seen and debated unreleased film to date. From one side we see BOPE's tough agents turning into the heroes of a frightened and paranoiac society, and on the other there is a police effort to block the film's screening. In fact, Padilha tried to express that something is wrong with the system, where underpaid officers “must choose between becoming corrupt, neglectful or going to war.”
But still some are accusing the film of fascism. Praised as a “City of God 2″, but presenting a narrative based on a policeman's perspective, the film is provoking heated debates across the country about the causes of violence in big cities. There are interesting discussions also on the morality of the widespread use of an unauthorized copy leaked to the web of an unreleased film. Surely, this case has made Brazilians go deeper into the actual meanings of piracy in the digital era, and it can turn out to be a defining moment for the audiovisual industry. Bloggers are all around it.
If cinema is truly a society's mirror, it seems imperative for Brazilians to seek a new urban order. What would certainly represent a shock, in the eyes of an international audience, disclosed, accurately, a widely spread sense of fear in the cities of the world's 10th economy.
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