Carandiru
A compassionate physician volunteers inside Brazil’s largest prison to combat a deadly AIDS outbreak, only to confront a brutal crackdown that threatens the lives of everyone he’s trying to save.
“Inside here nobody is guilty. Do you believe that?”
Synopsis
When a doctor initiates an AIDS prevention program at Casa de Detenção de São Paulo—Carandiru, the largest prison in Latin America, he encounters individuals who would later become victims of one of the darkest days in Brazilian history. On that day, the State of São Paulo's Military Police, under the guise of law enforcement, opened fire and killed 111 people inside the facility. The film is based on real events and on the book written by Dráuzio Varella.
Credits
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How many hands made this film
The scale of the collaboration
Principal cast & crew: 22
These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.
Why a floor?
This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.
Craft leads on file
Edited by Mauro AliceShot by Walter CarvalhoScored by Andre AbujamraDesigned by Clovis Bueno
Box Office
2003 · Box office
✅ Made its money back — grossed 2.9× its budget
Why 2.5×?
Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).
Worldwide gross
$10.8M
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Cast & Crew
22 unique people credited
Top billed cast
Directors
1Writers
4Producers
3Other crew
6Parents Guide
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