In October 1992, Brazil's notorious São Paulo Detention Centre—aka Carandiru—erupted in a full-scale riot which left 111 inmates brutally slaughtered by trigger-happy military police. Director Hector Babenco's movie charts the events that led to the uprising, using the arrival, some 12 years earlier, of Drauzio Varella, a doctor employed by the authorities to quell the rapidly rising AIDS epidemic in the facility, as our entry point into the story of this hellish, overcrowded facility.