Joseph Salomon Frank, producer of Manda Bala

In 2002, Jason Kohn and Joey Frank began filming a documentary about corruption and kidnapping in Brazil. Five years later, Manda Bala premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It won the coveted Grand Jury Prize.

We spoke with Joey Frank on the heels of victorious debut, and the beginnings of what is sure to be one of the hottest documentaries of the year.



Chief Magazine: You won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and as I understand this was a surprise to you and everyone else who made this film. What does something like this mean for Manda Bala?

Joseph Salomon Frank: Presumably the movie will get a better chance at distribution because of these wins. It’s a hard movie to convince someone to see, but the images speak for themselves If a company would begin to put the images out there it would slowly get the audience it deserves.

Could you talk a bit about the inception of the film?

The film was conceived by Jason Kohn as two kinds of theft: kidnapping and corruption. But he thought that they could be themes, and the body of the film could be the stories of this frog farmer and this plastic surgeon who pioneered ear reconstruction. We soon realized that the film needed to present the actual issues in order to have anyone give a shit about it, and that our want to get the audience to care about what they are watching ultimately culminated in getting the two criminals for our film. It has the attention to both these portraits that don’t seem central to kidnapping and corruption. Because they are given the same air-time, they become a fresh look at the current society in Brazil (which Jason describes as “broken”).  As a portrait of an invisible political network, it can be applied much more universally than just Brazil.

---

---

What was your role in the production?

My role in the production was to go down with Jason to Brazil and make the movie with him. Neither of us had done anything like this before. We started in the summer of ’02 and it took almost three months of living in Sao Paulo before we made enough connections to begin production.  We shot for four or five weeks and it was very intense; 16 hour days for us (12 for the crew), six days a week with a crew sometimes as big as 15 Brazilians, all professionals in the strong commercial industry that they have there. The only leads we had before going down were the Frog Farmer and the Surgeon, who Jason had spoken to before hand, and who had agreed to be interviewed. By the end of that first phase we had conducted interviews with an anti-kidnapping detective, a paranoid business man, a microchip salesman, the assistant attorney general of Brazil, and a victim of violent kidnapping – as well as the two original subjects of the farmer and the surgeon. That was just the first of three trips that spanned almost five years.

---

---

This was your first time in Brazil, and you went three times. Jason Kohn, the director, has family there, but you were essentially alien to South America. As you were there, you were interviewing people and learning of the slippery slope between politicians, the backlash of a shadow market (kidnapping), and a truly corrupt economic template by which this country is being run. As a documentarian, you're learning that the people of Brazil are being robbed blind yet you're engaging them outside the film as a tourist. What was it like learning such things just as you were getting used to the social climate of Brazil?

Yeah, I think the fact that I had never been to Brazil made my eyes kind of fresh for the world around us. Jason had felt some of the same amazement when he first visited Sao Paulo-- the helicopters, the teeming skyscraper farms, outcroppings of luxury apartments next to cheaply slapped-together favelas [Brazilian term for shanty town], and so many concrete skeletons of never-completed buildings. They seemed the most ominous. I was down there three times, and the last time we took a trip to Belem to catch the politician. I was never really in fear in Sao Paulo, but there is something about Belem. Maybe because its so close to the equator and people just have a different kind of sweaty vibe there. It rains every single day and there aren’t proper sewer systems in the town. There is this feeling that Jader [the corrupt Don of Belem] had control over everything, knew what hotel you were staying in, even though he was fighting the primitive technology of a city where you could wait in deadlocked traffic for three hours because of people blocking an intersection box.

This film began, correct me if I'm wrong, as a college project. What were the limitations of your operations?
 
Jason had Graduated Brandeis in ’01, was working as a researcher for Errol Morris, and living in Dedham, Massachusetts. I had transferred to Brown University and was due out in’03, but did a couple of summers and falls in Brazil and did not finish until a couple of years after that. The limitations were not knowing how much money everything would cost.   We thought we could make something for 25k. And we did. Then we got more money to make something more.

We see some helicopter shots, some photography that, if anything, feels Hollywood-y in its slick presentation. We've spoken before about how Kohn really admires the look and feel of big budget, but surely you were limited. How did you achieve such shots?

It’s a very slick film. Jason has always wanted to direct Robocop or Lethal Weapon, and there is a sense that you are in the hands of a great entertainer when you watch Manda Bala. The music, the attention to the visual image, and the production value of that image allow for an audience to relax into modes that that they reserve for fiction and engage with the movie in a more enthusiastic manner. It helps that we have a tight story now. We shot from a helicopter on two occasions. We took the camera into the operating room for the surgery – the day before that surgery we had to sterilize all our equipment.  The crew wore scrubs. I was one of a five-person crew in the surgical theater, a set-up that included a proper dolly.
 
In a situation like Wholpin, we see filmmakers kind of pursuing fascinating pet-projects in shorter films. At what point did this become a feature film? Was it conceived as a full-length documentary, or did this start as a pet-project? Where is that line drawn?

I would never, ever use the term “pet-project” to describe the film, neither my involvement and certainly not Jason’s. If you take it seriously, you have a better chance of getting something serious out. It was always meant to be part of a feature. I think Jason probably had that internal desire not to make it a short film more than I could have ever understood. But I understand the feature fire now.
 
I had the honor to attend an intimate screening of Manda Bala. You and Jason had some challenging questions about where the impact of the film was afterward, and you were truly gracious to the responses. What were the benefits of test screenings like this? Was there a time when you began to feel that outside opinion may have leaked to far into the film?

Well it’s really hard to be editing nine hours a day, six days a week, figuring out how to present an 85 minute film, and then have people make big suggestions after just sitting those 85 minutes with it. Jason knows this better than me, but editing was the most challenging part of this documentary. The thesis was intact from the get-go, but getting that on screen and into a compelling story was the hard part. Jason  took the stance early on of not being defensive in the Q&A that followed screenings, and just let people talk. He always explained himself clearly, but let people talk in a non-aggressive atmosphere where they felt comfortable with their intelligence about the film. That approach does make the comments confusing to sift through sometimes, because I sometimes think “Well, we were granting this opinion some validity a second ago… but I guess it’s actually idiotic.”

---

 

---

Perhaps the piece de resistance of the film is the interview with a kidnapper.  I know there was a point, before the film was released, where this interview was not slated to be in the film, but that you thought it necessary to complete the film, and you and Jason fought for it. How did you make contact with him?
 
Jason tried to set up the interview with the kidnapper for months [while] living in New York and trying to have a prison confirm an interview. I was completing my degree at Brown, and Jason would call and tell me things like we need to pay-off a lawyer who represents the kidnapper, the Judge who sentenced him, the warden of the jail, and the wife and kid of the kidnapper living in the favela!  All of this bribing, and there was no guarantee that we would get a criminal who actually cut an ear off. But months would go by, and I would talk to Jason and he would have spent a week playing on-line video games and have no money, not enough money to pay the rent. Finally I convinced him, and more importantly he convinced himself, that the only way it was going to work was to go down to Sao Paulo and live with his father and just do it. He would say things like, “I am not going down without having a lead,” but eventually he went.

The Brazilian prison systems were stonewalling him because of some recent unflattering documentaries by outsiders. It took three months in Brazil before access to the kidnapper fell into Jason’s lap, just by coincidence. The same conversation in which Jason told me the good news, he told me to [fly] down. Three days later I was boarding the plane, and Jason found word that we would only have limited access to the favela, and that the taxi driver who had put us in contact with the kidnapper had his life threatened. It was a very scary scenario with a guy who was a big time drug dealer and killer. I sat in Jason’s father’s office in Sao Paulo during the day of the shoot. It was one of the worst days of my life, although strangely great because it felt like it was the end. I [asked] myself, “Is this the sacrifice that I need to make in order to bring this film into conclusion?” It seemed so impossible at one point that this film would ever make sense in an appealing way to an audience. Anyway, I realized that I had come down to Brazil for another reason. We needed that politician [Jader], and no matter how impossible Jason had thought it was going to be, we had to give it a shot. Two weeks later, I was on another plane to Belem and Jason and I sat down with a video camera. We were out of any kind of budget money, to conduct the only video interview of the film with our central subject. That was six months before winning at Sundance.

The kidnapper lives in the ghetto as a king. It is clear that he is dangerous, that he kills, steals, et cetera. It was an intense climax to this documentary to imagine the filmmakers in this place, confronting the subject of this documentary. Why do you think he "makes" this film?

At the end of a movie about corruption and kidnapping, you want to point fingers, you want to watch a culpable party be held accountable. What our film lacked for a number of years were those bad guys. They were in the film as abstract threats, as characters, but not as people. And that’s the magic of documentary, the danger and the magic, which Errol understands so well;  when you point a camera at someone, one of the only things you see is a human being. You see a character, their clothes, and listen to them say what they say. But even if they are rapists, killers, or mass-murders, they are still at some level simply human beings devoid of malice, with a certain native charisma.  How do you represent a bad guy?  Charlton Heston is a lunatic asshole when it comes to his interpretation of the second amendment, or at least Michael Moore thought he was a lunatic asshole. At the end of Bowling for Columbine, you want someone’s head to roll, but the way that Moore approaches Heston seems unfair. It’s this weird symbolic attack on an old man who is not actually so culpable. Moore’s films have always been about finding the men in power so that he could speak truth to them. One of my favorite aspects of Manda Bala is that it describes a system. It illustrates that system for the audience. The cycle of violence becomes complete when you hear from the criminals, hear them speak for themselves, defending their actions without being directly attacked. At the end of a Michael Moore movie, the audience is asking themselves if they agree with his tactics.  The job of the Manda Bala audience is to judge the rationalizations presented by the criminals and figure out if they are unforgivable.  No answers are offered to the audience, but a creative human mind, when presented with an accurate problem set, will figure out the solution, or at least the best step forward.

---

Manda Bala opens in NYC at the Angelika on August 17th and 
15 other cities soon thereafter.

Website

www.mandabala.com

---