Well this was kind of inevitable:
A drama about a Brazilian man killed by police in London is being filmed... Mango Films will focus on events before the death of Jean Charles de Menezes - mistaken for a suicide bomber - and the impact on London's Brazilian community.
Hmmm. For every great movie like United 93 there seems to be a complete mess like World Trade Center so it's a worry as to how this one will turn out. The BBC had already turned down the chance to film the project. Stephen Frears is set to produce which is slightly reassuring given his track record, but director Henrique Goldman is a bit of an unknown quantity. His last film was a documentary about his own ex girlfriends.
"I think the public knows a lot about this story, but they don't know who Jean Charles was, and who suffered because he died. That's what we want to tell in this film."
Now that sounds perfectly reasonable.
He said he was not interested in focusing on the role of the police in the 27-year-old's death. "As soon as I think of the British police, I think of The Bill"
Yeah, if only someone had the power to represent them in a different light then. Someone like a director perhaps.
"Dramatically, the British police are very, very boring."
Not enough drama with the police on high alert after a successful major terrorist attack and a story that at its heart features an innocent man being trailed by armed officers and subsequently shot to death on a tube train?
The role that the police had in Jean Charles de Menezes' death was a pretty big one seeing as they are the ones who killed him by shooting him seven times in the head. Goldman however would rather waffle on about the Brazilian police:
"The Brazilian police would be much more interesting - in the same year, the Brazilian police killed more than 2,000 people and didn't have to apologise. I don't find the British police so interesting, no matter how dishonestly they behaved in this event."
Well here's an idea. Why not fuck off and film that story then?
It's going to be hard to focus on the gap left after a man's death without looking at why exactly he was taken away from his friends and family in the first place.
Photo credit: IndyMedia
