The film follows two good-looking kidnap victims plucked off the streets while out on a date (their expensive car made them an easy target) and the trio of violent men who hold them hostage.
In a story that could easily have been yanked from the headlines of any Latin American newspaper, "Secuestro Express" entertains while at the same time exposes audiences to the truly horrific plague of 'express kidnappings' that's sweeping Latin America.
INTERVIEW WITH JONATHAN JAKUBOWICZ:
There’s one kidnapping every 60 minutes in Latin America yet most people outside the cities affected are totally unaware of the problem. Are you amazed by how few people in America know about these kidnappings?
“Yes. It’s quite amazing how being so common down there, how many people in America have never heard about it. In many ways the reason we made the movie was because [of that]. My producer who is Dominican but has lived in America for many years, she told me I should make a movie about that. I said, ‘I don’t think that’s that great of an idea because that happens every day.’ And she said, ‘That’s exactly why it’s a great idea – because that happens every day there but nobody knows about it here.’
That’s how we started and that’s how I began all the research and all the investigation that got me to really understand not only the real problem behind it, but the society that I’d been living in my entire life. Because it was even for myself a real journey of education and understanding of the way that people - 80% of the people live in poverty in my country - the way they live, the way they think, and why this is the fastest growing crime in Latin America.”
You were a kidnap victim. Why would you want to go back and visit that traumatic event?
“Because I don’t want people to go through that in the future in Latin America, and I think it’s really important that we address the reasons that are making this happen. I had the privilege of surviving and I had the privilege of being a storyteller. I thought it was really necessary for my society to go to the next step and to improve and accept the fact that that the 80% of the people who live in misery deserve to be looked upon and deserve to be dealt with.
This is not a coincidence; this is a consequence of an extremely unfair society. I thought it was necessary and I thought I’d use my own experience to tell the story. If you look at the language in which the movie is told, that is the way I perceived reality during those 45 minutes when I was kidnapped with a gun under my nose. That’s the way you see it during that fragment, that hyper-reality in which you don’t really see places or people but images that keep combining in your brain and giving you a sense of reality. And when a lot of people watch this movie and say that they felt that they were kidnapped, I think it’s because they were looking at what was going on from the eyes of a person who had been kidnapped.”
The pace of this film really makes the viewer feel as though they’re right there with the victims.
“It’s a combination of acting style, shooting style and definitely editing. Even sound effects… I mean, there is a little bit of everything there. It’s also when you’re shooting in digital video, you get to experiment much more and you get to cover so much more of the scene than you would if you were using 35mm.
We were shooting with very small cameras, sometimes with three cameras simultaneously. Sometimes we put a camera in the hood of the car, a camera in the side, and a camera in the sunroof looking down. When you have those three angles and you have incredible performances – you can cut from each one of those hand moves and you already have a scene. But if you do it twice, then you have six angles, you know?
It was an entire process of getting to where we are in the technique. Each and every department was on the same page. We wanted to create that perception of reality that’s hyper-real and it’s faster and more thrilling than any Hollywood thriller.”
Did you base the kidnappers in this film on the men who kidnapped you?
“These guys are more violent than the ones I encountered. And they’re also more angry than the ones I encountered. Not much, but definitely some. You get to see more of that in the film.
I was also kidnapped for only 45 minutes and it was a more simple kidnapping. But they were definitely based on my experience and of different experiences that I learned from kidnappers and kidnap victims that I talked with when I was doing the research.”
Page 2: Jonathan Jakubowicz on Research and His "Secuestro Express" Cast
