Garapa José Padhila

Brazilian director José Padilha, best known for the award-winning Tropa de Elite (2007), spent over a month filming the three families in the eastern state of Ceará, each living in different environments and circumstances but all suffering from the same plight. The film is bookended by statistics, and interspersed with interviews with the families which shed some light on the intricacies of the problems faced: unemployment, alcoholism, resistance to birth control and insufficient government support all play their part. But its real focus is the everyday experience of hunger and the material ways in which people cope with it. Shot in natural light on earthy black and white film, Garapa is almost aggressive in its unflinching portrayal of the families’daily routines, lingering on the mothers preparing meagre meals, the fathers laying about in dejected inertia, and their children’s listless attempts at play. Indeed, the film’s greatest power lies in making palpable this experience and its compounded effects—not just physical, but also emotional, psychological and spiritual.

The dilemma comes into focus when we consider the ethics of making a film like this in the first place. While eating together before and after each day’s filming, Padilha and his crew did not give his protagonists food during filming. This seems unconscionable, yet at the same time one could argue how else a documentary about hunger could be made—in attempting to make tangible the experiences of the estimated 920 million people living in hunger, it would be pointless to film a well-fed family. Since filming completed, Padilha has helped the families considerably—according to him, they effectively “own the film” and any profits it makes are going to them. He also clearly felt that presenting their story to the world was worth wading through the ethical quagmire of observing their misery.

In appraising the film, this is perhaps the defining question: what can it actually achieve? Writing for the industry paper Variety, Leslie Felperin argued that the film’s austere style—she calls it “repetitive, ugly and unremittingly bleak”—would limit its commercial appeal, “thereby limiting its exposure and ability to effect change.” Felperin even suggests that “any manipulative, sentimental 60-second commercial” would represent “more effective means of combating hunger”. But the problem in both cases seems to be the same: whatever the intention and inherent power of the images presented, its effect will always be limited by the context in which it is seen. Ads that try to sell the plight of poverty in between cars and Coca Cola turn it into another product which consumers can buy if it suits them, or ignore if it doesn’t — and films that screen at film festivals are no less part of a marketplace. Audiences will leave and go buy a ticket for the next film.

Padilha has created a powerful work, but the most important question is how such power can be translated into real-world change—and no-one seems to have found the answer to that yet.

Donal Foreman