'Stop! You aren't supposed to kill them'

The new film by the director of 'Kiss Of The Spider Woman' retells Brazil's worst police massacre, which left over 100 people dead, writes Patrick Wilcken.

The prisoners disagreed about what sparked the riot. Some said a drug deal, others a five-pack-of-cigarettes debt, still others merely an argument over a game of football. Whatever it was, bad feeling spread rapidly through cell block 9 of São Paulo's Casa de Detenção, known as Carandiru, a sprawling 1950s-style concrete complex housing more than 7,000 inmates, more than twice the number it was designed for.

On the day of the riot cell block 9 quickly divided along the lines of gang allegiance. Makeshift barricades - stained mattresses, bed frames and broken chairs - were erected, and the inmates armed themselves with home-made knives, piping and clubs. Outside a tropical rainstorm was brewing. Descending through the cloud cover, a military helicopter hovered low overhead while below, in the prison courtyard, men dressed in riot gear assembled, pumped up, readying themselves to storm the building.

It might have been a regulation operation - riots are common in Brazil's dilapidated, overcrowded and barely policed penitentiaries - but something was not quite right as the riot police snapped their visors shut, racked their weapons and followed their commander, Col Ubiratan Guimarães, into the block. Half an hour of mayhem ensued, ending with the screams of one of Guimarães's men: "Stop, for God's sake! You aren't supposed to kill them. That's enough; it's over, it's over." Then there was silence. Gun smoke hung in the air; all around were blood-spattered walls and bodies - on their fronts, on their backs, kneeling, propped against walls, spilling down stairs.

More than 500 rounds had been fired, an inquiry would later find, and, although the crime scene would be substantially altered by Guimarães and his men, the bodies carried away by surviving inmates and stacked in two-metre-high piles, their wounds told the story. There were 37 shots to the back of the head, many in a downward trajectory, and more than 150 to the backs of arms, hands and legs and in the back. On the morning of October 3rd, 1992, 111 prisoners lay dead; not one of Guimarães's men had been killed.

The prison massacre ends Carandiru, a new film by the Argentine-born director Hector Babenco. Babenco is no stranger to prison drama: his best-known film, Kiss Of The Spider Woman, an adaptation of Manuel Puig's novel starring John Hurt, was set behind bars; Pixote also begins with the travails of a young boy in a juvenile detention centre in São Paulo.

Babenco admits to the dramatic possibilities of closed communities - a prison being, in a very Brazilian metaphor, like "a lift stuck between two floors at the weekend". But the story behind Carandiru is a remarkable tale in itself, a personal drama with something of the flavour of a Latin American novel. In the early 1990s Babenco was struck down by non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was a creative man in his prime who found himself totally incapacitated, like "an amoeba" with the drive of "a lettuce leaf". His directing career on hold, he lay convalescing in hospital, tended by his long-term friend and doctor, the cancer specialist Dráuzio Varella.

In 1987 Varella had embarked on an ambitious project. He had decided to research the incidence of HIV infection inside Carandiru - a confined, unsanitary environment where anal sex and intravenous drug use were rife. But his investigations would develop into something much more than a dry epidemiological study. Varella became engrossed in Carandiru - the set-up, the inmates and their lives - and ended up volunteering his services each Monday for more than a decade. And by telephone or at his bedside, he began telling Babenco of his experiences inside one of Latin America's largest prisons.

As Varella's study developed into a veritable ethnography, he described to Babenco the extraordinary characters he had come across: ageing transvestites, their bodies misshapen by backstreet injections of industrial silicone; his expert medical assistant Edelso, who, with no formal qualifications, had passed himself off as a doctor on the outside; the serial murderer who came to Varella as a patient, worried because "he had lost his capacity to kill". It was a world peopled by men with eccentric nicknames beloved of Brazilians: the flamboyant transvestite Lady Di, the midget Minimum Wage and the amateur philosopher No Way.

For Babenco, Varella became "a kind of alter ego", someone who was doing something creative and vital, at a time when the director could do nothing at all. He encouraged his doctor to set down his experiences in book form. The outcome, Estação Carandiru (Carandiru Station), is now a surprise best-seller in Brazil, having sold more than 400,000 copies, and was recently adapted into a BBC radio play.

Varella's book is a superbly written evocation of life inside Carandiru. The tiny number of corrupt, poorly paid and badly trained guards (often no more than a dozen overseeing several thousand men) meant that power was effectively devolved to the prisoners themselves. Nevertheless, Varella found a kind of order inside Carandiru.

The inmates were poor - "It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Carandiru," says the prison director sardonically - yet an internal market of sorts flourished. The prison had its own "cost of living", paid for by money generated by odd jobs - cutting hair, trafficking drugs, distilling pinga, a strong rum - and ploughed back into the system, often invested in real estate. When Varella began visiting Carandiru it had been years since the prison authorities had intervened in the allocation of cells - the less salubrious were passing hands for 150-200 reals (€40-€55); one "luxury" cell with tiles, a double bed and mirrors was worth 2,000 reals (€550). The market had produced neighbourhoods: evangelicals occupied one floor, transvestites another, an underclass crammed into the smallest cells, some with scarcely enough room for everyone to bed down at the same time.

Sex was strictly policed by the inmates. In the very Latin culture of the prison, transvestites were treated well - as ladies - with cell-block marriages performed and recognised. During conjugal visits, a measure introduced to reduce tension in the prison, the men's wives were respected, the queue to use the bedroom orderly. There was no need to bang on the door; the punctuality was, according to Varella, "British".

At the centre of the system was the wing boss, the product of a Darwinian struggle for power. It was arduous at the top, the leaders suffering from overwork and anxiety "as if they were top executives in a multinational". Varella treated one prison boss, Bolacha, for symptoms of stress. The exhausted Bolacha unburdened himself in a monologue straight out of The Sopranos. "I wake up already full of problems," he confided. "There's a guy who wants settle a score on the outside, someone who wants to kill a punk, dig a tunnel, recover a debt . . . . I need to defuse so many situations, doctor, I am like the head of a family. I can only relax at night after everyone's gone to bed." As Babenco battled his condition, Varella's characters sedimented themselves into his imagination. After a bone-marrow transplant in the US and a lengthy period of recuperation back in Brazil, he was finally able to work again.

At first Babenco was reluctant to take on the project, he admits over an echoing phone line from São Paulo. The book was "a bunch of anecdotes", and after reading and rereading chapter drafts he had even become "tired of hearing the stories". All his friends said that the material was perfect for him, that it was "like Pixote 20 years on", but Babenco remained unconvinced. Then, on a trip from Rio, he bought the book at the airport and read it for the first time all the way through. The experience was a revelation; for the first time he saw how Varella's stories were wound together into a complete world. It "relit the fire", says Babenco.

Eight drafts of the script later the filming began. Parts of Babenco's Carandiru were shot inside the prison itself - then a political embarrassment after the massacre and in the process of being decommissioned. Babenco had filmed there before for certain scenes in Kiss Of The Spider Woman and returned partly for authenticity, partly as a cost-cutting drive.

The arrangements of the filming were strange, to say the least. "I was handed a gigantic key by the governor," says Babenco, "after I had signed an agreement with the state authorities that I would be responsible for everything that happened during the six-week shoot."

At times it must have seemed like a foolhardy agreement to enter into. Three thousand prisoners still remained inside the complex, some of whom shouted abuse through their cell-window grilles while their actor doubles went through their paces. As the shoot got under way there were death threats and rumours that prisoners were planning a massive breakout - and that Babenco would be taken hostage at knife point.

At one point a police helicopter reported a riot, seeing men unfurling a banner across the prison roof and smoke billowing from the yard. The banner turned out to be part of the set - a light-filter screen - and the smoke from a fire burning off rubbish.

Shooting the climactic massacre scene, the problems were more logistical: with 1,000 extras - some of whom were former inmates at Carandiru - horses, dogs and heavy weaponry, the prison yard was transformed into something like it might have been on the day of the killings: a maelstrom of orders shouted through megaphones, chaotic movements of people and general confusion.

Like Fernando Meirelles's ultraviolent gangland epic City Of God, Carandiru has done extremely well at the box office in Brazil, grossing more even than The Matrix Reloaded. The audiences have cut across Brazil's gaping social divide, from the poor whose life the film portrays to the wealthy, curious to know "who these guys we fear so much are", says Babenco.

Both films created an aura of uneasy recognition on their release, a tableau of 21st-century Brazil. They put a human face on the violence and lawlessness sweeping through Brazil's megacities and exposed the corrosive culture of impunity that has long spread through all levels of Brazilian law enforcement. Carandiru, Babenco is anxious to point out, was not so much a prison as a detention centre for the accused awaiting trial, some of whom might have languished there for years before being formally sentenced.

Justice has also been slow to deal with the perpetrators of the Carandiru massacre. Col Guimarães even managed to run for political office, his ballot ticket "111" a reference to the prison death toll. It was not until July 2001, after years of stalling and cover-ups, that he was finally brought to trial. He was sentenced to 632 years in prison but is still free, pending an appeal, and remains unrepentant, lampooning Babenco's film in the press, even trying to block its release through the courts.

Babenco is surprisingly forgiving towards Col Guimarães and his men. "I don't blame him; the man was totally unprepared," he says. "The lights were out, they had water up to their ankles, they were afraid as hell of getting AIDS." The police and the inmates were united by poverty and ignorance. "The only difference between them was the uniform," says Babenco.

Carandiru itself is no more. On August 12th last year, 250 kilograms of explosives were detonated at structural points around the compound. Great clouds of dust mushroomed out from around cell block 9's base; its lower floors fractured, the building shuddered, then buckled, falling back into a mass of rubble. Babenco's film set had been levelled in just seven seconds.

Politicians hope the demolition will efface the memory of Brazil's worst police massacre, but the success of Babenco's film means that the site will be forever associated with the events of October 1992.

Carandiru is being screened at UGC on Saturday at 10.30 a.m. as part of Dublin International Film Festival