Bus 174

Directors: Felipe Lacerda, Jose Padilha
Actors: Sandro Do Nascimento, Rodrigo Pimentel, Luiz Eduardo Soares, Anonymous, Maria Aparecida
Studio: Arts Alliance Amer
Category: DVD

List Price: $9.95
Buy New: $5.13
You Save: $4.82 (48%)

New (32) Used (20) Collectible (1) from $4.47

Rating: 17 reviews
Sales Rank: 21953

Format: Color, Dvd-video, Letterboxed, Widescreen, Ntsc
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 122 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6

MPN: 670111
UPC: 829567011126
EAN: 0829567011126
ASIN: B00022FW4U

Theatrical Release Date: 2002
Release Date: July 20, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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Customer Reviews

   Read 12 more reviews...

BUS 174    December 10, 2008
D. M. Davis
Bus 174 has to be one of the best documentary films I have seen in a long time. I recommend it to anyone that likes documentary or Portuguese films.


Great film    January 5, 2008
Cristiano C. (Amsterdam)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

This film is the story of a desperate act and it's protagonist.
The story jumps between the dramatic kidnapping of a line bus in Rio and the past of the perpetrator Sandro. Avoiding moral judgments the filmmaker finds the right angle to open our eyes on a dramatic reality we often tend to thrust aside or romanticize. While the stock footage and some shots (the intro is one of the longest and most incredible helicopter shots ever) visually perfectly stick together, the interviews sections in between feel a little poor. Great film though!



Bus 174    July 18, 2007
John Farr
0 out of 2 found this review helpful

This terrifying real-life nightmare is like watching a car accident in slow motion. The unending cycle of poverty in Rio creates the conditions for such an atrocious crime. Yet it's also understood this could happen most anywhere similar social dynamics exist. More than anything else, the film posits, Sandro feels forgotten and invisible- he wants to be recognized, wants others to feel and acknowledge his anger at being discarded and neglected for so long. Leading up to its shattering conclusion, the film makes us watch what otherwise we'd too readily avoid, and in the end, Sandro gets his wish.


Social and economic rights    April 6, 2007
Kamau McKoy (Deerfield, MA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful

I first heard about Bus 174 in a law seminar on human rights and culture. For a high school class I am teaching on human rights, I was looking for films to show. Bus 174 is an excellent film in its own right (well directed and edited, etc). But it will certainly prove educational in my class. The film asks the viewer to consider to what extent the state is responsible for lawlessness when lawlessness is a result of the desperation that springs from poverty and social marginalization. Given insufficiently trained police and their resultant tendency toward brutality, and a criminal detention system in which prisoners live under inhumane conditions, how can anything but anger and violence amongst prisoners and ex-convicts result? Hard questions confronted by the robbery/hostage incident aboard Brazil's Bus 174; an incident depicted exquisitely by this film.


Glob Of Reality Thrown In Right In Brazil's Beautiful Face..    May 28, 2006
K. S. John (Brooklyn, NY United States)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful

This documentary chronicles the hijacking of a bus by a drugged and desperate Sandro Rosa do Nascimento, who upon realizng the national spectacle that he is causing, begins to create a drug-influenced show that mixes criminal bravado, important social commentary, and terror that exposes some of the weaknesses of Brazil.

It turns out that this hijacking became the most infamous crime in Sao Paulo's history, if not the whole of Brazil's.

When we examine his past, it turns out that Sando do Nascimento was a survivor of the "Candelaria Massacre" which occured seven years earlier. In this, the police took revenge on homeless kids by converging and firing on them while they slept, killing seven of them.

That event was PREVIOUSLY the most infamous crime in Brazil's memory.

The fact that Nascimento came from that tragedy to create the next big one, topped by the fact that during the siege he actually MENTIONED the killing of his friends at Candelaria, and his witnessing the murder of his mother at a young age, and his phrasing, "Brazil, check this out" & "How can you let someone with such a pretty face die?" hit me as this whole criminal act having a higher meaning in Brazil society.

It was as if this whole thing occurred to motivate the government and people of Brazil to do much more to try easing the social ills and unequality. That pretending that these things dont happen and that the problems of certain people don't exist will only create ticking time bombs that will eventually begin to constantly explode directly in their faces instead of somewhere "out of sight", where it is preferred. Actually, I am suprised that the result of this was not much worse.

It's horrible that an innocent life was lost during this, and its just as sad that the government hasn't done much since to help more at-risk individuals from completely going off the deep end like Nascimento.