WHAT IS MOST AMAZING about "Carandiru," Hector Babenco's brilliant, fact-based drama about events leading up to a notorious 1992 massacre in a Sao Paolo prison, is how a film so claustrophobic manages ...

Hells on Earth, alas, abound, and many of them have bars and guards. We've had our own recent experience at Abu Ghraib, from which we continue to stagger in recovery, as if such things still have the ...

It has been two decades since a shocking massacre in Brazil led to the deaths of more than a hundred inmates at the Carandiru jail in Sao Paulo, but the city has not forgotten. On Wednesday, hundreds ...

Hector Babenco's prisondrama Carandiru has become thehighest grossing Brazilian film of all time in its home territory according tolocal distributor Columbia TriStar. In terms of admissions, it ...

From its very first scenes–showing the arrival of a young doctor of shining goodwill and naivete at boisterous Carandiru prison in Sao Paolo, Brazil–Hector Babenco’s “Carandiru” is a prison movie of ...

More than two million Americans live in prison, but American movies and television usually recoil from the reality of penal institutions. Because it’s a frequent setting in crime dramas, we all think ...

A group of fifteen police officers have been sentenced to 48 years in prison for killing four inmates during a police operation in the now-defunct São Paulo Penitentiary. The incident became known as ...

The jail was demolished in 2002, but the state has been slow to bring the perpetrators to trial Twenty-five police have been given long sentences for their part in the 1992 massacre in Sao Paulo's ...

It was with trepidation that I called up Hector Babenco to ask him if I could interview him again about his film Carandiru. My laptop, including all my notes from a previous 90-minute conversation, ...