Sequestro (Kidnapping) trailer now online

Award-winning writer-producer-director Jorge W. Atalla (In Cane For Life) and executive producer Frederico Lapenda are ready to share Sequestro, a powerful documentary about Brazil’s Anti-Kidnapping Division (DAS), with audiences on September 10th. With the consent of the Brazilian government, the production was given unprecedented access to the unit and witnessed privileged information that assists in keeping São Paulo’s 18 million people safe. The division – created in 2000 when kidnapping was at its boom in the city – reduced crime numbers to less than 70 cases in 2009, a far cry from the over 500 reported cases in a given year.

Sequestro was written, directed and produced by Jorge W. Atalla, produced By Alexandre Moreira Leite, and executive produced By Frederico Lapenda and Christian Gudegast.

The film will open on Friday, September 10th, in New York City at The IFC Center and in Los Angeles at Laemmle’s Sunset 5.

Here is the official synopsis for Sequestro:

Award-winning filmmaker Jorge W. Atalla (In Cane for Life, A Vida em Cana) brings to the screen Sequestro (Kidnapping), a powerful Brazilian documentary chronicling the heroic efforts of the Anti-Kidnapping Division of the São Paulo police department (Divisão Anti-Sequestro aka DAS) from 2005 until 2009 – a time when kidnapping was booming business in Latin America’s largest city. Sequestro travels deep into the seedy world of organized abductions for the purposes of extortion, exploring the lives of those victimized while tagging along with investigators as they work around the clock, following clues and apprehending suspects in effort to locate victims before it’s too late. Sequestro, often set in some of the nastiest neighborhoods in the world, is a pioneering feat of filmmaking that captures for the first time on film, what it is like for police who risk life and limb busting into captive houses, in an attempt to find and free men, women, and children who have been violently separated from their families.

Check out the riveting trailer below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjEAjqLi21Y