Acts of Men

This was intended as a film on the problems and lives of people murdered in Baixada Fluminense, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The district is notorious for violence, criminality and terrible poverty. At the end of April 2005, a month before shooting was due to begin, murders in other parts of Rio led director Kiko Goifman to reassess his plans. In one day 29 people in the city's poorest quarters were killed. The killers, whose victims are the poorest and most abject of slum dwellers, are members of a death squad made up of local police officers. They are also frequently involved in blackmail, kidnapping, drug dealing and murder. In the light of these events, Goifman decided to shoot a documentary on violence in the whole of Rio de Janeiro. Acts of Men focuses on the everyday lives of residents of the Brazilian metropolis. It exposes the city's deep social differences, the low value placed on human life and the ease and ubiquity of killing. Rio has been notorious for violence since the 1950s, but today's killing and brutality, in which the police are heavily involved, has reached shocking extremes.