Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

FILM-BRAZIL: Tortured Monks

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 14 2007 (IPS) - A Brazilian man strides forcefully through a forest. His bushy beard hides any emotion on his face. Using a short ladder to mount a wall, he climbs on to a branch of an enormous tree. He ties a rope, carried under his coat, around the branch, and hangs himself.

“Batismo de sangue” (Blood Baptism) begins with this violent scene, which is actually the result of other forms of violence, as the film goes on to show. Brutality is represented in a highly realistic fashion. The impact is heightened as the audience learns that the victims they see being so brutally tortured are friars of the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church.

The Brazilian film tells an extraordinary but true episode of the struggle against the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

Five Dominican friars in Sao Paulo supported a Brazilian Marxist urban guerrilla movement, National Liberation Action (ALN), one of the most active of its kind between 1968 and 1972 in Brazil’s large cities.

Director Helvécio Ratton decided to make a film based on the book of the same title by well-known writer Frei Betto, who was one of the Dominicans involved in the events of 20 years ago. In 1983 Betto published his memoirs of that period of conspiracy, imprisonment and torture.

The movie portrays the dramatic experiences of the five Dominican friars, who formed a support group for ALN leader Carlos Marighella.

Information extracted under duress from Friars Fernando and Ives by Inspector Sergio Fleury, one of the military dictatorship’s most infamous torturers and death squad organisers, led to the November 1969 ambush in which Marighella was killed.

The film’s central character is Friar Tito de Alencar Lima, who was ferociously tortured, to the point where he slit a vein in his left elbow in jail. But his suicide attempt was frustrated by immediate medical attention from his guards, and he survived.

The physical and mental suffering inflicted on Alencar Lima became a permanent and intolerable burden of pain.

After being freed in early 1972 along with 69 other political prisoners, in exchange for the Swiss ambassador who had been kidnapped by urban guerrillas in Rio de Janeiro, Friar Tito went into exile in France, after living for brief periods in Chile and Rome.

But the constant memories of the excruciating torture and recurrent visions of Fleury and a military officer, his two most notorious torturers, impelled Friar Tito to commit suicide in 1974.

Frei Betto worked as a journalist before moving to the south of Brazil, where he helped activists and guerrillas to leave the country.

It took him 10 years to write his memoirs of the involvement with the ALN guerrillas, and the imprisonment, torture and life in prison of the five Dominican friars, only one of whom escaped physical torture (because he had been sent away to Paris).

Ratton, who early in his career made children’s films, was also a victim of the dictatorship, and had to go into exile in Chile in the early 1970s.

The director has spared no details in the film’s crude portrayal of torture. Victims are shown on the “palo de arará”, that is, hung from a pole between the back and upper arms, with the wrists bound to the feet, and subjected to electric shocks applied to sensitive parts of the body, including the genitals, ears and mouth.

The realism was necessary to show why something snapped in Friar Tito, making him a broken man, Ratton said.

It was also essential to tell things how they actually were, in all their crude reality and with no half-truths, he said, so that upcoming generations can understand what really happened during the military regime.

That was also why some scenes give the impression of being overly didactic, for example part of the beginning of the film, when the guerrilla leader explains to the Dominican friars the reasons and tactics behind his struggle, he said.

The film does not attempt to use innovative cinematographic language, nor does it use metaphors. Quite simply it tells a story from Brazil’s recent history, from the point of view of a torture victim, Rattan said, countering criticisms that torturers like Inspector Fleury were stereotyped.

Ratton was awarded the prize for best director at the Brasilia Festival in 2006 for his courageous decision to make such a dramatic film about members of a religious order who were willing to resort to violence on behalf of the poor and oppressed, and who were tortured as a result.

“Batismo de Sangue” is one of a spate of recent films about resistance against the Brazilian dictatorship. Usually, however, the resistance was carried out by groups of revolutionary activists, not monks.