I ended up renting this sort of randomly a month or two ago since I seem to have already watched all of the more immediately appealing documentaries on Netflix. I wasn't really looking forward to watching this when I got it, since I tend to try to avoid depressing entertainment, and Manda Bala is a little bit depressing. It's about Brazil, and the country's brutalities are depicted in detail. You get the impression of a country whose rulers are often very, very corrupt, and whose middle class residents are constantly at risk of abduction by gangs of professional kidnappers. The topic switches back and forth between those two topics, starting off on a frog farm whose construction was financed by millions of dollars in misdirected development funds, and then switching to discussing things like a business that sells armed luxury cars and a plastic surgeon who has developed an innovative new surgery to construct new replacement ears for kidnapping victims.
The particular thing that I was impressed by was the clever parallel the filmmakers managed to create between the corruption perpetrated by the elites upon the underclass, and the kidnappings perpetrated by the underclass upon the elites. They film a professional kidnapper, who explicitly justifies what he does because of the way wealthy politicians have screwed over ordinary people, and who has used his ill-gotten gains in order to help out the people of his poor neighborhood.
Anyway, I thought a lot about the movie after seeing it. Hopefully some of you guys also got around to seeing it.