BEHAVE

Behave follows the process of minors who have fallen into the hands of the Brazilian legal system. Boys and girls from underprivileged backgrounds faced with crime, rulings, and sentences handed down for theft, drug trafficking, and even murder. Due to legal constraints about revealing the true identity of the minors charged, the accused adolescents were substituted with young people chosen for having themselves lived in similar social conditions, although innocent of any actual crime. All the other characters in Behave – judges, prosecutors, public defenders, correctional agents, family members – are the real people filmed during the hearings in the Juvenile Court in Rio de Janeiro and visits to the Padre Severino Institute, the correctional facility where the law-breaking minors are sent to. At the end of Behave, the film sequences reveal the consequences of a formal society that recommends to their children to behave, but does not set a good example itself.