SEQUESTRO (KIDNAPPING)
Directed by Jorge W. Atalla
Produced by Atalla & Alexandre Moreira Leite
Written by Atalla & Caio Cavechini
Released by Yukon Filmworks/Midmix Entertainment/Filmland International/Paradigm Pictures
Portuguese with English subtitles
Brazil. 94 min. Not Rated

The web of events that lead to South America’s booming kidnapping business is as fascinating as it’s sternly instructive, a lesson in unintended effects. As the Soviet Union began its decline in the 1980s, it began to defund the South American leftist guerilla movements it had been supporting. Desperate for new revenue streams to continue their struggle, a number of these revolutionaries took up kidnapping, holding their abductees for ransom. After the kidnappers’ capture and arrest, the courts sought to shame the revolutionaries by sentencing them in prison with hardened, common criminals. While they held higher ideals—or so they claim—to survive in prison, they spilled their secrets about how to kidnap. After the common criminals were released, they began their own wave of abductions, eventually building a multi-million dollar business.

Sequestro (Kidnapping) follows the daily lives of police in the São Paulo anti-kidnapping division. What could have easily been aggrandizing or voyeuristic or exploitative is instead rendered affable, heartbreaking, and honest, never reducing the subject matter to easy tearjerking. The documentary truly earns the emotions director Jorge W. Atalla brings out in the audience. Kidnapping, especially the financially motivated type endemic to South America, is an immediately compelling story. Sequestro was therefore Atalla’s film to lose, and one of the main ways this could have happened was by treating it as talk show melodrama. Instead, the film is truthful and brutal. The tension it creates is meaningful, and the resolution is emotionally and narratively realized and not simply used for effect.

What helps this transcend exploitation is the way Atalla cuts macro- and micro-story lines together to convey the ground-level story in its emotional complexity as well as the global story in its political complexity, showing how the two feed into each other. The larger story, enumerated above, gives grounding to the smaller narratives—a family dealing with kidnappers for the return of the father, jailed revolutionaries recounting their beginnings, stories of countless kidnapping victims—and the smaller stories give meaning to the larger narrative, letting it resonate with the audience. Above all though, what elevates Sequestro is not simply Atalla’s treatment of the subject matter but also his handling of the on-camera abductors. Kidnapping is without a doubt morally reprehensible, and the kidnappers are ethical monsters. The easy path to take would have been to depict them as shadowy villains, but instead, like in great crime dramas, he reveals them as humans, giving them context without absolving them. Atalla renders them understandable, not simply as products of evil. Andrew Beckerman
September 17, 2010