Taking control of chaos

The kidnapping happened fast. It was early evening in a nice part of Caracas, the Venezuelan capital gripped in recent years by political chaos and street crime. Young filmmaker Jonathan Jakubowicz and a friend were driving home from a movie when a car suddenly cut them off and forced them to stop. Two assailants jumped in, guns drawn.

Jakubowicz recalls a sensory rush. The gun against his head. Barked commands to look down. Fleeting glimpses of people and places. The confusion of not knowing where he was.

It was all over in less than an hour. No ransom notes. No calls to relatives for money. Just stops at ATMs to drain bank accounts and at stores to use credit cards. The victims were released on a highway outside of town, no car, no cellphones, no shoes.

The filmmaker found the experience unsettling, but he didn’t dwell on it. And when producer Sandra Condito suggested the topic might be grist for a film, he dismissed it as too mundane.

“I told her it wasn’t that important because it happens every day,” Jakubowicz recalls. “And she said, ‘That’s precisely why it’s important.’ Seriously, it’s so frequent to be kidnapped, I didn’t consider it that big of a deal. But now that I think of it, I guess it is.”

Kidnappings have become commonplace in Latin America -- one per hour on the continent, according to one estimate. In places such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Caracas, almost everyone knows a victim. More and more, the middle class has fallen prey to so-called “quicknappings,” in which people like Jakubowicz are held for short periods for fast cash. The crime now has a nickname based on the Spanish word for kidnapping -- “secuestro express,” a sort of in-and-out abduction.

The more Jakubowicz delved into the problem, the more he was convinced his producer was right. The planned project evolved from a music video to a short film and finally a feature-length movie, joining a spate of recent films dealing with Latin America’s most turbulent themes.

Drawing on his own ordeal, minute by minute, he wrote the riveting story of a couple kidnapped in Caracas by three street thugs after a night of partying. Jittery, unpredictable and immersed in menace at every turn, the movie bristles with a raw-nerve realism arising from “that continuous flow of fragmented images” he recalls from his captivity.

“The way the movie feels is the way I perceived the kidnapping,” says Jakubowicz, 27, who spoke accented yet fluid English during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “You see images. You hear voices. You get a feel of the environment and the relationships of the people that are suddenly in control of your life. That’s what I intended to create in the movie, and that’s what people seem to feel from it. They feel they’re being kidnapped. And I think that’s my greatest accomplishment -- to translate the way you feel when you lose total control of your life.”

“Secuestro Express,” which opened Friday, marks the feature film debut of this documentary filmmaker, who parlayed a chance encounter in Caracas into an informal internship with Austin-based producer Elizabeth Avellan, the Venezuelan wife of director Robert Rodriguez. Behind the scenes, Avellan offered moral support and an incentive for her young protege: Bring back a good film about kidnappings and she’d provide post-production services.

The deal paid off. Times critic Kevin Thomas calls Jakubowicz’s debut a “jolting, go-for-broke thriller.”

The film opens in Caracas this week, in what the director describes as the widest release ever for a national production. But he hopes it will be more than just a box office success. He wants his movie to be the spark for “a social movement” that prompts Venezuela to confront the problem he considers “a national emergency.”

A city of predators

The Caracas of “Secuestro” is a town where nobody can be trusted, not even the one you love. A place where the car you drive identifies your social class and makes you a target for the vengeance of the poor, represented by prowling predators.

Jakubowicz’s screenplay takes surprise twists that reveal layers of problems on both sides -- corruption, drugs, selfishness, betrayal.

Reality was never far away as the film took shape. During the eight-week shoot in early 2003, six people directly related to the crew were kidnapped. And separately, a girl was snatched from the street two blocks from the filming location in Caracas.

The film stars Mia Maestro, from the ABC series “Alias,” as one of the victims and singer/actor Ruben Blades as her father. But the rest of the main cast consists of nonprofessionals. Jakubowicz recruited rappers from the city’s slums to play the perpetrators, roles they imbued with a creepy naturalness that startled even the director. He knew he was taking a chance in casting the three kidnappers: Pedro Perez and Carlos Madera of the duo Vagos y Maleantes (Vagrants and Thugs) play Budu and Niga, while their producer, Carlos Julio Molina, plays Trece. As a team, they had had hits before. But they had never been in movies.

Still, Jakubowicz decided they had one thing actors can’t be taught: a knowledge of the barrio conditions that are caldrons of crime. They knew how real kidnappers would talk (a street slang foreign to the upper class) and how they would react in the unstable, short-fuse situation of a quicknapping.

To prepare the actors, Jakubowicz staged a mock kidnapping at the apartment of his older brother, a physician who took an active role in the production. The director says he was shocked by the realism of the rehearsal.

“I saw the best 35 minutes of improv I’ve ever seen in my life,” he recalls. “You can see my camera was shaking because of how scared I was with these guys. I could have never found in the world an actor that can play those roles, because these are human beings that are a consequence of years and years living in the worst misery possible. And that’s something you can’t act.”

Jakubowicz incorporated their ideas into the script and let them improvise during filming. Their performance skills helped them orchestrate the movie’s explosive, shouted dialogue.

“They never interrupt each other,” Jakubowicz explains. “They’re used to rapping and improvising together, and that’s really important when you’re acting.... Sometimes we were in the car with five people screaming and yelling at the same time, but without interrupting each other. They wait for the right beat to enter.”

Working with people from the Caracas barrios compelled Jakubowicz to try to understand and portray the motives of the kidnappers. He saw them as human beings, not just as villains.

At one point in the film, an intimacy develops between Carla (Maestro) and Trece, Molina’s handsome middle-class thug, “who communicates with both worlds,” as Jakubowicz puts it. Trece chides Carla for flaunting her wealth in the face of misery and asks, “How can you expect people not to hate you?”

Youthful inspiration

When Jakubowicz was born in 1978, street violence in Caracas rarely spilled out of the slums that ring the city, nestled in a valley where the Andes meet the Caribbean Sea. He says his family was comfortable but far from wealthy.

At 13 he picked up his father’s home movie camera, and he never let go. “I had a VHS and a video camera, and that’s all I needed,” he says. At home, he developed his technique and the social conscience that would inform his work.

His mother, an endocrinologist, and father, an engineer, were among a handful of family members who survived the Holocaust, fleeing their native Poland as child refugees who later met in Caracas. His grandmother often told him stories of the concentration camps and flight to freedom.

Those became inspiration for Jakubowicz’s 2000 documentary, “Ships of Hope,” recounting the flight of Polish Jews to Venezuela.

“Being a Jew means you understand what it means to be marginalized,” he says. “It gives you a sense of respect for any human being, and I think it helps me understand my society. The way poor people are treated in Latin America is definitely not comparable to the Holocaust, but it’s got a little bit of that -- you know, the social elite thinking you’re not even human, like you’re some sort of a monkey or something.”

Jakubowicz himself has all the traits of the Latin American elite: fair-skinned, well traveled, educated. He studied classical piano and earned a degree in communications from Universidad Central de Venezuela. At 17 he was already a film critic, a columnist and the host of his own cultural affairs show on the main news radio station in Caracas.

It wasn’t just his pedigree that opened doors for his movie career. It was ambition -- and a serendipitous meeting. The man who owned Venezuela’s first Internet provider came to the Jakubowicz household to discuss the service and happened to mention that he had a famous son-in-law in the United States -- Rodriguez. The installer was Joaquin Avellan, Elizabeth’s father.

“From then on, I didn’t let him rest until he introduced us,” recalls Jakubowicz, who lists Rodriguez among his influences, along with Quentin Tarantino, Milos Forman and Oliver Stone.

His persistence led him to a job as a gofer on the San Miguel de Allende set of “Once Upon a Time in Mexico,” the 2003 Rodriguez film starring Antonio Banderas, Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek.

Elizabeth Avellan says she recognized in Jakubowicz the same work ethic and dedication she saw in her husband early on.

Soon she was guiding the young filmmaker. “Jonathan, he’s like my child,” she said. “I have disciplined him. I have kicked him ... and pushed him up the hill. He would sometimes throw a tantrum, and I’d just go, ‘No, this is what you need to do.’ And he’d do it.”

Like “El Mariachi,” the stylish independent film that launched Rodriguez’s career, “Secuestro” has garnered high-powered Hollywood attention. It’s being distributed by Miramax, the firm founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who are splitting from the parent Walt Disney Co. this fall.

The brothers are taking Jakubowicz with them to the new Weinstein Co., which has signed a deal with him. He is already working on his next movie, “Paranoia,” a psychological thriller.

Staying close to home

Clearly, Jakubowicz has a chance to take on Hollywood. It’s hard not to wonder, then, why he doesn’t leave his conflicted homeland, where the rich live behind ever bigger walls with ever more security.

But Jakubowicz vows he won’t be one more refugee from crime. His success won’t be his ticket out of Caracas.

“I love the city,” he says. “It’s the only city I would die for. It’s paradise in so many ways. That’s the problem we have -- none of us wants to go anywhere else. We want to fix it because we need to fix it in order to live in paradise.”

Soft-spoken, well read and articulate, Jakubowicz sees in himself as much a social crusader as a filmmaker.

“I got a taste of what it’s like to be in control of people who hate you, and who have a reason to hate you,” he says. “That’s what gave me the idea that I had a duty to improve the levels of understanding in my society. If there were reasons for something this horrible to happen, there’s no excuse for me to work on anything else but fixing those reasons.”

The director’s solution for Venezuela’s complex social issues can, however, sound simplistic. The poor and the rich need to communicate, he says. And he hopes his film will start that constructive dialogue.

One critic isn’t buying it, though. Ed Gonzalez of Slant magazine, an entertainment website, dismisses “Secuestro” as a “juvenile inspection” of the problem, a sensationalist movie that exploits the gap between rich and poor.

“The film doesn’t function as art or sociology because it’s nothing more than a Hollywood calling card,” Gonzalez huffs.

Says the director: “I’m not here to preach.... I’m just here to show both sides of a reality and let the audience and society figure it out.”

Jakubowicz appears adept at managing a polarized debate, a skill he honed during filming in 2003. Leftist President Hugo Chavez was coming under increasing attack, and he was even deposed by a coup for a brief period. Arranging location shoots in Caracas meant negotiating with factions that had control of different parts of the city at different times. Complicating matters were the seven separate police forces, which didn’t always get along.

“Both sides asked me who I was with,” recalls Jakubowicz, “and I said, ‘I’m only with Venezuela.’ I’m sending a message to my entire society, not just to those who are with Chavez or those who are against him.”

And what is the message?

“We’re either going to learn to get along, or we’re going to kill each other.”