It was June 12, 2000, Brazil's Valentine's Day, but nobody was in the mood for love. Gifts sat unopened and romantic dinners grew cold as people watched a real-life drama of hate and fear unfold in their living rooms. Sandro do Nascimento, a petty crook from the streets of Rio de Janeiro, had taken 10 people hostage at gunpoint on a public bus — and the hijacking was playing out live on national television. As afternoon turned to night, TV news crews crept closer to bus 174, until they were able to capture the sounds as well as the images within. For over four hours every scream, every tear, every plea was broadcast nationwide. When a SWAT marksman shot at Nascimento and accidentally hit a female hostage, some 35 million people watched her die.

Documentary maker José Padilha had been running on the treadmill at his local gym when the news broke. He watched the tragedy unfold with a filmmaker's eyes, sensing an unsettling poetry in the raw, grainy images and the delicate power play between Nascimento and the passengers. He also saw the holes in the narrative. "You could see the relationships developing between Sandro and his hostages," he recalls. "But you didn't get a sense of who he was or what he wanted."

So Padilha, 36, decided to find out: barely a month later, he had started work on Bus 174, his sixth film. Part thriller, part social commentary, Padilha's film interlaces footage of the hijacking with interviews with many of the protagonists — hostages, police officers, negotiators — and people from Nascimento's life. His objective: to show how the system failed Nascimento, 21, and still fails the thousands of other youngsters living on Rio's streets. "By understanding Sandro's story you understand his behavior," Padilha says. "What happens to him before he becomes a street kid ... nobody's responsible for that.

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) But after he becomes a street kid, he's in the hands of the state, and now we are to blame."

Padilha was forced to dig into his own pocket to buy over 24 hours of news video after TV Globo, the country's leading commercial station, refused to exchange them for first rights to show the finished film. They told him nobody would want to see a movie when they already knew the ending. Little did they know: Bus 174 was the No. 1 film in Brazil last year and won awards at some of the top film festivals, including Rio, Chicago and Rotterdam. Why are Brazilians so willing to relive that fateful day? Perhaps because the film puts a human face on the statistics — a recent unesco study shows that more young adults die from violent crime in Rio (128 out of every 100,000 people aged 15 to 24) than in any other of Brazil's 27 states — and goes some way toward explaining them.

Nobody is sure why Nascimento got on the bus — some say he was running from police, others that he was planning to rob the passengers. But once trapped inside, with the cameras rolling, the young man who had felt invisible all his life realizes that, for once, all eyes are on him. "Didn't you kill my friends at Candelaria?" he yells out the window, referring to the 1993 massacre when hooded men believed to be off-duty police officers opened fire on a group of children, including Nascimento, asleep on the steps of a downtown Rio church. Seven died. "The trend is that people who have been left out of society are resorting to violence to get attention," says Padilha, himself born and bred in Rio. "There are people who want to get their word out so badly that they are prepared to lose their lives to do it." That was to be Nascimento's fate. After the woman hostage was killed, he was grabbed by a group of angry cops, bundled into a van and allegedly suffocated to death on the way to hospital.

To heighten the drama of the hijacking, Padilha uses attention-grabbing techniques that are more John Woo than Michael Moore — flashbacks, slow motion, reversed colors and a haunting chorus on the soundtrack. These cinematic flourishes help lift Bus 174, out now in Britain and released in the rest of Europe later in the year, into the league of recent breakout Brazilian films like the adrenaline-soaked slum drama City of God and the hellish prison story Carandiru. At one point in the film Nascimento screams: "This ain't no action movie!" No, but it is a gripping look at the world through the eyes of Brazil's lost and forgotten.

• JUMANA FAROUKY
• Bus 174 explores the hidden, hopeless world of Rio's street kids