Director Jason Kohn on Documentary as Provocation

Shot in Anamorphic Super 16, Manda Bala Connects Poverty and Corruption

The striking documentary Manda Bala: Send a Bullet, director Jason Kohn's debut feature, tells the often lurid, sometimes heartbreaking, and generally terrifying story of corruption and poverty run rampant in contemporary Brazilian society. Beautifully photographed — mostly in anamorphic Super 16 — Kohn's journey begins on a frog farm where his interview subject ducks his questions about political scandal and ends in the city slums — the favelas — where he interviews a masked outlaw who claims to kidnap and disfigure wealthy Brazilians, then re-invest the ransom money in his own community. Along the way, Kohn talks to policemen, a businessman who travels the city streets in bulletproof cars, a plastic surgeon who specializes in kidnap victims, and even Jader Barbalho, the politician who serves as Manda Bala's bête noir.

Unexpectedly, Kohn says he didn't make Manda Bala in order to raise awareness of poverty, or to effect change in Brazil. He says he made it more to challenge what he saw as hopelessly mundane, limiting ideas about what documentary films could and should be. The effort has opened some doors for him — Manda Bala won the Sundance Film Festival award for documentary cinematography as well as the jury prize for documentary, and it cleaned up at last month's Cinema Eye Awards for documentary filmmaking — and he's working on a screenplay set in Southeast Asia, dealing with corruption and violence in the international cargo-shipping business. In a wide-ranging, occasionally profane phone interview with F&V, Kohn complained about the state of documentary film, described the dangerous business of spending time at home with a violent criminal, and answered a few of his critics. (Manda Bala is available on DVD from City Lights Pictures.)

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