http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWNsUXcUYwo

“Elite Squad”, a much-hyped film about Rio's special forces police is having its official launch today in Rio and São Paulo, and the nationwide premiere is scheduled for Oct. 12. The peculiar thing about this release is that an estimated crowd of 3.5 million people have already seen it before its debut. The [unauthorized] copy of the film can be viewed or downloaded from many different places on the web, and the speculation is that more than a million copies of the DVD have been sold on Brazilian streets across the past few weeks.

Praised as a “City of God 2″, but presenting a narrative based on a policeman's perspective, the film is provoking heated debates across the country about the causes of violence in big cities. There are interesting discussions also on the morality of the widespread use of an unauthorized copy leaked to the web of an unreleased film. Surely, this case has made Brazilians go deeper into the actual meanings of piracy in the digital era, and it can turn out to be a defining moment for the audiovisual industry. Bloggers are all around it.

To sum it up, the movie is about police corruption in Rio and how the police, at the different levels (civil, military, etc) managed to extort just about everyone and everything in Rio. But it focuses on the BOPE, the “Elite Squad,” that is the Brazilian version of the SWAT. They are the ones who invade favelas, especially after the regular police botch up invasions or extortion visits. It focuses on the captain, who slowly unravels, and the training and selection of new BOPE members as they ascend from the ranks of the military and civil police… One of the main characters is a policeman and a law student, who tries to show these rich kids that they are the ones helping to cause the violence by buying drugs that come from the favelas, challenging the concept that the wealthy here are not to blame for the city's violence, and that they are untouchable.