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You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Director: Alain Resnais

Genre: Drama

Running time: 115 minutes

Not rated: smoking

With: Lambert Wilson, Mathieu Amalric, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azema, Denis Podalydes, Anne Consigny, Michel Piccoli

In French with subtitles

German Garcia-Velutini got into his car and left work one day. It took him 11 months to get home.

Kidnappers had nabbed the Venezuelan banker. His abduction is part of a problem that's been getting worse every year for the past decade in Venezuela, which belongs to a region riddled with crime and the most violent cities in the world.

Gracia-Velutini tells his story at an outdoor table at a hotel in Caracas, the capital, with a view of a mountainside that climbs into the clouds.

He recalls his departure from work that fateful day in 2009, which took him as usual to a highway ramp, where he had to hit the brakes.

"It was like a stopover by what I thought were policemen because of their jackets," he says. "They had long guns, automatic rifles."

Garcia-Velutini is a trim man, with glasses and a mild expression that matches his mild tone as he describes learning the men were not police.

"They took me out of the car and pushed me into another vehicle and injected me" in the thigh, he recalls.

"I passed [out] in seconds. ... When I woke up, I was being pushed in a small room. They took all my clothes," he says, leaving him only with a T-shirt and underwear.

The banker had fallen into the hands of professional kidnappers, who held him for months as they demanded ransom from his family.

"They were very proud of what they were doing. They took pride in their profession," says Garcia-Velutini, who came to that conclusion because of the kidnappers' elaborate techniques.

They kept him in one windowless room. Music played constantly so he would hear nothing from outside. Cameras followed his every move. He never saw his kidnappers, who pushed food and notes for him through a sort of doggy door.

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Babylon, like many favelas, is located a short distance from the most affluent areas of Rio, where property is among the most expensive in the world. Shoup lives only a few hundred feet from the tourist beach at Leme. She says the main reason she moved to a favela was because it was cheap, but the low cost isn't why she stays.

"I always say I feel a lot safer at night walking here than I do in Copa or Leme," she says. "I like sprint through Copa or Leme when I get off the bus. When I get here, I say whoa, OK."

That feeling of security in favelas like Babylon is the result of a government project called pacification. In the past, police used to raid the favelas, battle with the drug gangs and then withdraw.

Now a specially created cadre of police called Police Pacification Units live and work in certain favelas full time, providing a permanent security presence. It's been a success in places like Babylon; the drug gangs have been driven out and now foreigners are moving in.

It's a similar story across town in the favela called Vidigal where 23-year-old Kate Steiker-Ginzberg lives.

"I have 180 degrees of ocean views living here in Vidigal," she says.

It's one of the ironies of Rio that its poor have the best views in the city. Many of Rio's favelas crawl up the city's verdant cliffs. The makeshift cinder-block homes sprout from the creases in the hills, overlooking the long white beaches and tourist hotels where the affluent come to play. In Vidigal, in particular, the views are breathtaking.

But it's not just the vista that attracts Steiker-Ginzberg.

"I think there are a lot of young people and a lot of students who come here with this idea of: How can we come and live here and really try and learn from a place?" she says. "How can we really try and insert ourselves in the community?"

Business Is Booming

There's another reason why many foreigners and Brazilians with means are coming to the pacified favelas these days — money.

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Two weeks after the brutal murder of a British soldier that brought a rise in hate crimes against Muslims in the U.K., a fire devastated an Islamic community center in London Wednesday. Scotland Yard says the cause of the blaze is being treated as suspicious.

"Graffiti was found amid the charred ruins, including an abbreviation for a far right anti-Muslim fringe group," NPR's Philip Reeves reports for our Newscast unit. "Detectives are trying to figure out when it was written."

Counter-terrorism officers are among those now working on the case, according to multiple reports.

The building, the Al-Rahma Islamic Centre, had been used by the Somali Bravanese Welfare Association, which is listed on a government website for Barnet, the local borough,as providing recreational activities, financial advice, and other services.

"I have absolute confidence in the police and their commitment to get to the heart of this matter," the leader of the borough council, Richard Cornelius, said. "We are very proud of our diversity and Barnet has long been a model of tolerance. In part this is because of the support the police give to all communities in the borough."

At the scene of the fire, the chairman of Somali Diaspora UK, Mohamed Elmi, told The Guardian that his group has received more than 100 phone calls today.

Fifty percent of those who contacted the organization "are scared – scared to leave their homes or women scared to wear their hijabs in the street," Elmi said. He said the fire had shaken many people in his community, but he added, "We have to be calm and strong and not let these people win."

Two main suspects in the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, who was killed on a street in Woolwich, in southeast London, by men wielding knives and a meat cleaver, are in police custody.

One of the men, Michael Adebolajo, 28, participated in a court hearing today by video link — but the judge ordered the video turned off after the suspect persisted in interrupting him, the BBC reports.