The Brazilian movie “Sob Pressão”, directed by Andrucha Waddington, tells the story of a precarious hospital in the middle of a favela and its medical team during a war between the police and drug dealers. One day, an officer, a drug dealer and a kid are hospitalized at the same time, and the doctors – who are few – need to decide who to take care of first.
Apart from the pressure the doctors must deal with – one of the officers keep yelling for the doctor to operate his colleague first; the drug dealers threateni to trespass the hospital and the kid’s father, who’s a famous journalist, telling them that, if something goes wrong, he would publish it in every newspaper about what happened – they need to face the problems that the hospital has, such as power shortage, absence of professionals and lack of appropriate equipment.
Furthermore, the chief, Doctor Evandro (Júlio Andrade), who’s days awake, is addicted to a drug. This makes him shivers when his out of the substance, and, under the effect of it, he can be considered unable to operate.
Between lots of problems and tensions that the movie talks about, the main issue is the veracity of facts. The lack of resources that the hospital has to deal with and the conditions of the doctors who work there are real.
So, this movie, although intense and extremely interesting, make it possible to think about the reality of Brazilian’s public health and its effects to the lives in the favelas.