The explosively violent crime thriller Elite Squad is the most expensive Brazilian film ever made. It has proved both highly successful and hugely controversial, angering critics, politicians and the police themselves. Some reviewers have even branded this multiple award winner fascist, although its message is ambivalent, maybe even subversive.

Elite Squad stars Wagner Moura and André Ramiro as friends rising through the ranks of the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE), a troop of highly trained, armed officers formed in 1991, chiefly to fight the ongoing war on drugs in Rio’s lawless favela slums. The more efficient these young BOPE recruits become, the more brutal their methods.

The characters of José Padilha’s film are seen as heroes in Rio, a city with skyscraping crime and murder rates. Some US news reports have taken this as proof that all of Brazil endorses right-wing death squads and vigilante justice.

“That’s basically ridiculous,” insists Padilha, an effusive 40-year-old with a background in physics, semi-pro tennis and investment banking. “That’s like saying Americans are gangsters because they like Michael Corleone in The Godfather. We don’t take ourselves that seriously.”

Elite Squad – Tropa de Elite in Portuguese – has inevitably been compared to City of God, the slum drama directed by Fernando Meirelles in 2002. They share a setting and a screenwriter, Bráulio Mantovani. But Padhila’s is a much more contentious film, not least because it is true.

“It’s very close to reality,” the director says. “Almost everything in the movie happened. The characters are based on real people. It only differs from reality because reality is probably worse than what the movie shows.”

Known as a documentary maker, Padilha conceived Elite Squad as a non-fiction project. It evolved from a book and screenplay collaboration between two former BOPE officers, Rodrigo Pimentel and André Batista, with the sociologist Luiz Eduardo Soares. Published in 2006, the book revealed the force’s shoot-to-kill ethos, as well as exposing an aborted political assassination plot by crooked officers. It proved wiser and easier to fictionalise such prickly material. All the same, the Rio police took Padilha to court to have his film banned, but the state governor intervened and a judge overturned the case.

Padilha insists that the film is a depiction of the stark moral choices facing Brazilian police officers. “If you are a cop in Brazil, the Government pays you $400 a month, you have a very bad training, you work inside a very corrupt environment,” he says. “If you are honest you’re going to fight with the drug dealers, because if they can’t cut a deal with you, they shoot you. So the rules of the game force you to make a choice: I am going to be corrupted or I’m going to be violent.”

To shoot in the favelas, Padilha had to cut deals with both police and drug gangs. Even then, the film-makers were caught in a firefight. During the chaos, one crew member was kidnapped and a vanload of fake weapons stolen. Happily, the bribes were paid and nobody was hurt.

A big winner at Brazil’s answer to the Oscars, Elite Squad landed the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin film festival this year. A spin-off television series is in production, but the controversy refuses to die. The Hollywood trade paper Variety called it “a recruitment film for fascist thugs”.

“Figure it out, guys,” laughs Padilha. “If you do a movie that explains the very violent behaviour of a street kid who has suffered at the hands of the state, then you are a Communist. If you do the same thing, explaining the violent behaviour of a cop in a government uniform, then in Brazil, you are a right-wing radical . . .”

Padilha argues that Elite Squad is so incendiary because it refuses to take the simplistic line of condemning police brutality. Does the director hold any firm views on the state of Brazil?

“Of course,” Padilha nods. “We will never solve the huge amount of violence we have in Rio by the means the BOPE guys use, nor by corruption. Of course I disapprove, but I actually didn’t make the point of saying that in the movie. I have a narrator who doesn’t respect human rights, tortures people, kills people – but he loves his kids and wants to save his marriage. Some people have a problem with that but, lo and behold, this is how life is. I am ambiguous myself. Everybody is.”

Elite Squad is released on Aug 8 2008

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