Carandiru

Carandiru is a Brazilian drama about Drauzio Varella, a doctor who begins volunteer work inside São Paulo's Casa de Detenção, the largest prison in Latin America. He arrives to run an AIDS prevention program, but finds a facility built for a few thousand men holding many times that number, where the guards have largely lost control. Rather than a simple medical assignment, the work draws him into the prisoners' separate society, with its own codes and hierarchies. As the inmates tell him how they ended up there, the film follows several of their lives through flashbacks, building toward the uprising that became one of the bloodiest episodes in Brazil's prison history. It is based on Varella's own account of his years at the institution.

Héctor Babenco directed and shares writing credits with Fernando Bonassi and Victor Navas. The film came nearly two decades after Babenco's Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ironweed, and returns to the prison setting and ensemble structure of his earlier work. Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos plays the doctor, with Milton Gonçalves, Ivan de Almeida, Aílton Graça, Maria Luísa Mendonça and Aida Leiner among a credited cast of 38. Shot for about 4 million dollars, it took roughly 11 million worldwide, a strong return on a modest production. On IMDb it holds 7.6 from around 25,000 votes and on TMDB 7.6 from about 630; critics gave it 6.7 from 81 reviews, so audiences rate it more warmly than reviewers did.