Last Stop 174

On 12 June 2000 in Rio de Janeiro, a young man took bus number 174 hostage. The siege lasted four hours and was broadcast live; a passenger and the hostage-taker both died at the end. The film tells the story of that young man, Sandro: growing up on the street, searching for his mother, and how he came to board that bus. The subject is not the hostage-taking but the twenty years before it. Sandro had witnessed his mother's murder as a child and was among the survivors of the Candelária massacre of 1993, when street children were killed by police in Rio. The film puts that at the centre. The form runs two strands in parallel: Sandro's story and that of a woman looking for her son. They join at the end, and that joining is invented. The production is based on real events but is fiction; there is an earlier documentary about the same incident which was widely seen in Brazil. This film reconstructs Sandro's life and imagines parts of it, a choice that was debated there. Bruno Barreto directs. Michel Gomes plays Sandro and Cris Vianna the mother. Who it is for: viewers who like Brazilian social drama and narratives drawn from real events. Who it is not for: anyone expecting documentary accuracy; the film sets a real life inside an invented narrative.