MOVIE · 2003

Carandiru

CrimeDrama148 min

When an AIDS specialist volunteers inside São Paulo’s Carandiru prison, he enters a crowded world governed as much by inmate codes as by the state. Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos is Drauzio, the doctor moving from cell to cell with a prevention program and an outsider’s eye, meeting men whose lives turn on violence, loyalty, religion, sex, and survival. Among them, Rodrigo Santoro and Ailton Graça help define the prison’s shifting hierarchy. The story stays inside Latin America’s largest prison in the months before the 1992 Carandiru massacre, with the routines, tensions, and alliances of daily life filling the space before the police arrive.