Carlos Eduardo appears before a Brazilian court in Rio de Janeiro.
With lowered eyes and a resigned air he denies the criminal offence of which he is accused: having knowingly used a stolen vehicle. He argues that he merely borrowed the car from a friend. However, there's no way he can get in touch with that friend, he claims. His mates would kill him straight away, and after all he has a little daughter. Carlos Eduardo's life is one of despair. He comes from one of the Rio slums, became a drug dealer when still a child, bribed and shot at policemen.
He is a victim of society and guilty in the eyes of the law. Carlos Eduardo knows very well that the car in which he was recently arrested was stolen. Maria Ramos's film JUSTIÇA avoids condemning him just as consistently as it avoids sympathizing with the defendant's fate. The camera remains pitilessly at a distance. Yet it is the camera that makes the mechanisms and power structure of justice visible. Eduardo's strict judge is sitting regally at the center of the picture, impatiently playing with her ballpoint pen. Lower down sits the accused with his back to the camera. On his left the lawyer defending him maintains a routine silence. She knows her client is guilty.
Maria Ramos's film narrative revolves around this picture like a spiral.
Starting out from it, the camera accompanies Carlos Eduardo's family members into the slum and shows the wretched conditions under which they live. When the film director later returns to the courtroom, the figures, place and composition of the image have remained the same, but they appear in a new context that is increasingly multifaceted. As with Eduardo's family, the film director also follows his lawyer to her home, a comfortable middle-class flat. While the television news reports on one of the countless brutal attacks on a supermarket, the lawyer enderly strokes her daughter's hair. JUSTIÇA is an impressively sophisticated and complex narrative about the relationship between power and justice - one that Maria Ramos's film shows in an ever-changing light.
