ACTS OF MEN should have been a film about the daily lives of massacre survivors in Brazil. Everything was planned for us to start shooting in April 2005. But reality did not wait. On the last day of March, exactly one month before principal photography, things changed: A terrible massacre took place in Baixada Fluminense, near Rio de Janeiro. Twenty-nine people were killed by a death squad, the largest massacre in the history of Rio de Janeiro. The killers are extermination groups made up of policemen who work in the area, and are involved in extortions, kidnapping, drug dealing and homicide. This has been going on since the 1950s, but it has never been as extreme as it is now.