Amid the civil-military dictatorship implanted with the 1964 coup, Sergio Muniz had the idea of making a documentary about the action of the Death Squad. At the time, the press still had some freedom to disseminate the work of these death squads formed by police officers of various ranks, and that he acted on the outskirts of cities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The victims of police repression (as today) were men, poor and black, and this condition is supposed criminals.
Direction
Muniz filmed while the death squads were still active—pure nerve.
Writing
Title's bitter irony: 'a nice ham' as slang for a good bribe.
Director
Sérgio Muniz
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The title's slang—'dar um presunto legal'—referred to cops taking bribes to ignore crimes, revealing how deeply corruption was normalized.
Banned and buried for decades, this was one of the first films to explicitly connect Brazil's military dictatorship to racialized police violence—a pattern that persists today.
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