Manda Bala

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Jason Kohn
Produced by	Julio DePietro (executive producer) Joey Frank Jason Kohn Jared Goldman
Cinematography	Heloísa Passos
Edited by	Doug Abel Jenny Golden Andy Grieve
Distributed by	City Lights Pictures
Release date	2007
Running time	85 mins
Country	Brazil United States
Language	Portuguese English

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) is an American documentary film directed by Jason Kohn about corruption and kidnapping in Brazil.

Kohn has said "I really thought of Manda Bala as a non-fiction RoboCop depicting a very real, broken, and violent society." It premiered January 20, 2007 at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary and the Excellence in Cinematography award. It had a limited release in North America beginning on August 17, 2007. On March 18, 2008, Manda Bala won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking at the inaugural Cinema Eye Honors.

Manda Bala profiles such subjects as a businessman who bullet-proofs his cars, a plastic surgeon who reconstructs the ears of kidnap victims, former Governor and Senator Jáder Barbalho, a powerful Brazilian politician from the state of Pará who used a frog farm for money laundering, and the owner of the frog farm himself (see SUDAM).

The film details many of the reasons for Brazil's corruption including the fact that politicians in office there are exempt from civilian court proceedings, with the consequence that they will never be punished for crimes they commit in office. Another factor — and the other driving point of the film — is the ubiquity of kidnapping in Brazil, which ensures that the likelihood of redressing these crimes is fairly low and that someone's enemies (political or otherwise) are apt to disappear fairly easily.

As of May 12, 2008, the film had a score of 80% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 45 reviews. On Metacritic, the film had a score of 74 out of 100 based on 5 reviews.