Carandiru

A doctor arriving at a vast prison in Sao Paulo begins talking with the inmates. Each tells his own story. The film gives its first two hours to these portraits and shows the prison as a community with its own economy, marriages and rules. The 1992 massacre arrives only near the end, by which time you know most of the men who die. That structure is the film's real decision. Hector Babenco directed. It is based on the book by the prison doctor Drauzio Varella, and it was shot in the real Carandiru before its demolition. A real warning: the closing section is a long and extremely bloody sequence of killings. A hundred and eleven inmates died that day, and the film does not spare it.