Stunned and frightened, Alessandro Ibiapina accompanied his mother into a bleak São Paulo, Brazil police station on the evening of January 27, 2008. Only four hours before, Jose Ibiapina--Alessandro's father--had been abducted by a small group of thugs while at work.
There inside the station, headquarters to DAS (Divisão Anti-Sequestro), or Anti-Kidnapping Division, sat Dario Dezem patiently waiting. Wearing a DAS t-shirt, he may have appeared to be a policeman, but in fact he was the primary cameraman working on Jorge Atalla's documentary Sequestro (Kidnapping). Living across the street from the station at a hotel for weeks, Dezem had been pining for a moment exactly like this. Even though he and Atalla had been shooting for more than three years and had countless hours of incredible footage, they felt the film lacked an important piece to Atalla's intricate vision.
Before the grief-stricken Ibiapinas entered the room where they would be interviewed, Dezem quickly taped a microphone underneath the table and casually set his DV Cam down, aimed and recorded the unaware Ibiapinas.
Completing Sequestro, Atalla's ambitious doc about kidnapping in São Paulo, would require other risks of far greater magnitude than the amateur subterfuge performed during the Ibiapinas' first visit to DAS. It would take four grueling years before Atalla satisfactorily documented the large criminal tapestry made up of kidnappers, the abducted, victims' families and police.
Long before Sequestro, Atalla, who studied filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, screened his first documentary, A Vida em Cana, in 2001 at a film festival in Miami. That same year, the kidnapping boom in São Paulo--over 300 reported cases--was grabbing headlines around the world. Considering his possibilities, Atalla thought he'd found his subject.
To film Cana, Atalla had lived with sugar cane workers for six months. So when he told a friend about examining kidnappings in his next film, Atalla's friend asked him, "If for your first film you lived for six months with cane cutters, how are you going to do the same for a movie about kidnapping?"
"I really had no idea what we were doing in the beginning," admits Atalla, who, battling continued resistance from his family for nearly three years of pre-production, had to keep his plans secret. Compounding matters, when his father's health turned poor, Atalla became saddled with more responsibility overseeing the family business. Finally, he was a rookie filmmaker looking for financing.
Atalla, patient and resolved, eventually scaled these early obstacles within three years, only to have a bloated production team waste the first $200,000 in three months filming training exercises rather than real action. Shortly after the money was gone, Atalla lost his permit to shoot--something that would happen several more times.
In 2004 Atalla caught a break. He was introduced to Artur Dian, a hotshot inspector in DAS who, at the time of their introduction, was working around the clock with his team on ten kidnapping cases. Meeting Dian was pivotal, but utilizing that contact to move the production process forward took a while. "I spent a whole year with Artur learning everything I could about kidnapping before we were able to get the permits we needed to film with DAS," says Atalla.
With permits finally in hand, Atalla and Dezem, now the sole cameraman, were told to stay out of the way when filming and to not expect DAS to spend much energy protecting them in the field. DAS advised the filmmakers, "If you hear shooting, duck."
Years of negotiating the clearance to film DAS was one thing, but winning them over proved to be another. "They are very closed and worried about what information they leak out because they are always dealing with a human life, so they didn't talk much [in the beginning]," says Atalla. "They didn't make friends with me at all."
For inspector Rafael Correa Lodi, it was not until he was truly convinced of Atalla's motives that he began loosening the tight reign he commanded. "I liked that [Atalla] envisioned a project that followed the day-to-day of DAS and would tell the whole story," says Lodi. He recalls being forced to accommodate news crews that would swoop in for only a brief spell, usually during highly publicized cases, mining more for controversy than truth.
With greater access came increased peril. And the dummy police uniforms and flimsy bulletproof jackets Atalla and Dezem donned were little protection against the emotional tragedy and violence they encountered. They were in the thick of it, just what they'd been after, but the question was, Would they survive?
"Sometimes when we were filming it was like being in a non-ending terror action movie," says Atalla, who was often away from home for two or three days at a time. And when he'd finally get home, he would be so full of adrenaline or anxiety from events he had witnessed, such as seeing a father handcuffed and hauled away from his wife and two sons, that he turned to sleeping pills.
Raids were by far the most intense aspect of the production process. The crew would have virtually no time to get ready because the DAS themselves would hardly spend any time prepping. "Unlike [in] the States, where floor plans can be acquired, [in the favela] it is impossible," Rafael explains. "We can't even cut the power and telephone lines." When the DAS team identifies a potential safe house, they take less than a minute to equip before entering. No news travels faster in the favelas than the presence of police. The DAS' goal is to get in the house and free the victim before the kidnappers have any idea what hit them. Where Sequestro excels are in those moments when the victims, who have been staring at death for days on end, tortured physically and emotionally, are instantly set free; they are overcome with joy.
After three long years interviewing victims and filming with DAS, both filmmakers were mentally fatigued. Dezem withdrew from friends and family. "I saw things I never imagined could even happen," he recalls. "It was hard to separate myself from the cruelty I had witnessed."Atalla longed for a vacation from the daunting task he had undergone. He wanted to spend time with his growing family. But even though his wife desperately hoped for the same, she knew, as did Atalla, that the film still lacked a key element.
Most of what he had were fragmented narratives, stops and starts with no beginning, middle and end. "We had always wanted to follow a family from the first day until the end," says Atalla. Without a primary narrative that could see the movie through from start to finish, his film would fall flat.
Dezem began sleeping in a hotel across the street from the DAS station, hoping to be at the station at just the right time. Finally, after weeks of nothing, on a hot evening in January, Dezem was present when the Ibiapinas came to the station looking for help.
Initially against the idea completely, the Ibiapinas slowly came around and granted Dezem access to their home.
It was just what the film needed, but Dezem was ill-prepared for this new level of access. "They began treating me like a member of the family," he explains. "I felt that the pain that the family was suffering, I was suffering too."
During all this, in some unknown apartment, lying on the floor behind a sofa, with a hood over his head, was Jose Ibiapina. And that is where and how he stayed for 33 hellish days before a deal was eventually struck. His son Alessandro delivered all the money he had been able to raise to a designated drop-off point before going home to wait. After 24 hours with no word, a taxi driver finally called, saying that he had Jose crumpled up in his back seat unable to speak, but he was bringing him home.
Alessandro quickly called Lodi, whom Dezem happened to be dropping off for the day. Lodi then informed Dezem he had about five minutes to get over to the Ibiapinas. Dezem left Lodi immediately, speeding recklessly across town. He managed to pull up to the Ibiapinas' home in the nick of time, hopping out of his car and aiming his camera just as Alessandro pulled his father from the taxi, embracing him joyously before rushing him inside.
Dezem was relieved to have gotten the pivotal footage necessary to wrap Sequestro properly, but more important, he was delighted to see Jose alive and reunited with his family.
As an observational film, Sequestro is a moving picture both emotionally and cinematically that avoids making assessments or critiques of its subject matter. This is a film about what victims of kidnappings endure and how they and their families cope during and after the ordeal. Atalla's perseverance and honesty proved to be his greatest assets in making his film, enabling him to gain the trust and access necessary to capture such immediate and raw footage.
Sequestro opens September 10 in New York and Los Angeles through Yukon Filmworks, Midmix Entertainment, Filmland International and Paradigm Pictures.
R. T. Watson is a reporter and writer based in Los Angeles.