Bus 174 details the hijacking of the eponymous vehicle in Rio de Janeiro in June 2000, which rapidly became a running national news story in the manner of OJ Simpson’s legendary car chase. While this in itself renders the film highly eventful, the real merit of 174 – as with City Of God – is the light it sheds on the distressing phenomenon of Rio’s street children, eking out existences like feral animals in the face of unimaginably horrendous circumstances.
One such was the bus’s hijacker Sandro do Nascimento, whose terrible life is explored in some detail: he saw his mother stabbed to death at age 10, endured the horrors of Brazil’s reformatories and prisons, survived a police massacre of sleeping street kids, and went on to wreak a terrible revenge. As the film makes disturbingly plain, such police massacres tend to be organised in conjunction with the local business community (shades of the formidable Ulster Loyalist Central Co-Ordinating Committee), and can meet with shocking levels of approval from the middle-class population, inclined to view the street kids as troublesome, pestilent vermin whose mere existence is a blight on Rio’s landscape.
Not a film which casts the Brazilian police force in a particularly saintly light, and certainly not a film to be watched and enjoyed for personal pleasure, Bus 174 is nonetheless powerful, hard-hitting, heart-rending stuff.