Salve Geral
| Time of Fear | |
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A poster with the film's international title: Time of Fear
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| Directed by | Sérgio Rezende |
| Produced by | Laís Chamma Joaquim Vaz de Carvalho |
| Written by | Sérgio Rezende Patrícia Andrade |
| Starring |
Andréa Beltrão Denise Weinberg Lee Thalor Bruno Perillo Guilherme Sant'Anna Chris Couto |
| Music by | Miguel Briamonte |
| Cinematography | Uli Burtin |
| Edited by | Marcelo Moraes |
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Production
company |
Toscana Audiovisual
Globo Filmes |
| Distributed by |
Downtown Filmes Sony Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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120 minutes |
| Country | Brazil |
| Language | Portuguese |
| Budget | R$9 million |
| Box office | R$2,644,26 |
Time of Fear (Portuguese: Salve Geral) is a 2009 Brazilian thriller film directed and written by Sérgio Rezende. It depicts the May 2006 riots perpetuated by the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) criminal organization in the state of São Paulo. The Ministry of Culture submitted it for consideration of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the 82nd Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The Film won the Crystal Lens Award for Best Feature Film at the 2nd Brazilian Film Festival of London.
The film portrays the fictional story of Lúcia, a widowed middle class piano teacher whose 18-year-old son Rafael is imprisoned before the riots because of his participation in a car accident which resulted in the death of a girl. While visiting her son at jail, Lúcia meets Ruiva (English: Redheaded), lawyer of "the Professor", leader of the PCC (referred in the movie as "The Command"). The two women soon bond, and Ruiva starts using Lúcia in tasks for the criminal organization. Lúcia needs the money so she ends up accepting the mission, putting herself in the boundary between legality and crime. Meanwhile, The Command is experiencing a turbulent internal dispute for power, while facing a common enemy: the prison system.
Salve Geral lampoons the mass media for generating panic among the population of São Paulo with its sensationalistic coverage of the riot and not revealing the real cause of the revolt, which was the degrading situation of the state prison system.
Although Salve Geral's main storyline is fictional, its background story is based on actual events that took place on 2006 Mother's Day. The riots caused the deaths of several people, most of them policemen. On May 11, 2006, the state government, based on information indicating the plans of PCC to perform a series of rebellions in prisons, ordered the simultaneous transfer of 765 dangerous inmates to maximum security prisons in the state. In retaliation, the leaders of the criminal organization commanded from within the prisons, through mobile phones, simultaneous riots and attacks on law enforcement officials. The message was clear: a "horror party" was to be done in each one of the neighborhoods of São Paulo. "Salve" (literally "save" or "hail") means "attack" in the Paulistano crime dialect of Portuguese language.
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Wikipedia