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When Hector Babenco's cancer doctor began telling him tales from São Paolo's most notorious prison, little did he know they would inspire his hit 'Carandiru'. He talks to Ali Jaafar about his comeback
Blood surges down the stairwells of Carandiru prison as wave after wave of riot police charge through the hallways shooting at unarmed prisoners. The floor is littered with dead bodies. "Let's play cops and robbers," says one guard as the prisoners cower behind what shelter they can find. The death toll will reach III, all inmates.
Veteran Brazilian director Hector Babenco's Carandiru reaches its climax by recreating the brutal events of 2 October 1992, when the overpopulated São Paolo casa de detenção played host to the worst massacre in Brazil's penal history. This climax is all the more devastating as we have by now spent two hours in the company of Carandiru's inmates, immersed in their world via the intermediary of an unnamed doctor who listens to the colourful stories of their lives, both on the outside and within the concrete walls. We meet Highness, a charismatic thief caught between a wife and a mistress; Dagger, the murderer who asks the doctor for a pill so he can kill again, his bloodlust having been deadened by guilt; the six-foot-plus transsexual Lady Di and the philosophising near-dwarf No Way, whose love affair and marriage lend the film a rare tenderness.
For Babenco Carandiru marks a return to form after spending much of the 19905 fighting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The character of the doctor is based on...