RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — It wasn't supposed to be released until yesterday, but for weeks already, pirated copies of the feature film "Elite Squad" — about the shady workings of Rio's Special Operations Police Battalion — has been a best-seller at street stalls across Brazil.

What people have seen in the movie proved so controversial that police tried to keep the film out of theatres, and the illegal early release left director Jose Padilha in the awkward position of criticising everyone who watched or wrote about his film, partially obscuring the film's message that society bears some of the blame for the squad's brutality.

Padilha won international critical acclaim for his 2002 documentary "Bus 174," which drew extensively on live footage of an hours-long hostage situation on a city bus that held a nation of TV viewers on the edge of their seats.

"Elite Squad" isn't a documentary, but it claims to tell the true stories of 12 former officers from the black-uniformed paramilitary unit whose very insignia — a dagger-impaled skull — strikes fear into residents of Rio's nearly 700 shantytowns.

The unit's members claim to be the world's most effective urban warriors. Engaging in almost nightly gun battles with heavily armed drug gangs, they have more house-to-house warfare experience than many soldiers.

The unit has a high kill ratio and relatively small losses. While no specific numbers are published, Rio police kill more than 1,000 people in gun battles and lose about 150 officers each year.

Rights groups including Amnesty International claim the squad fires indiscriminately, often from inside a tanklike vehicle and carries out extrajudicial killings as a matter of routine.

The former squad members whose experiences were depicted in the film "were very concerned about sharing the blame with society for the repugnance of their professional lives," Padilha told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.

The film doesn't "assign blame but relations of cause and effect," he added. "Police don't exist in a vacuum."

Still, pirated copies proved so real to life that squad members tried to halt its theatrical release, arguing, among other things, that the film could endanger police by tipping off drug lords to the squad's tactics.

Judge Flavia Almeida Viveiros de Castro denied the officers' request after she saw a pirated copy, ruling that the film "represents day-to-day reality for a good part of the people living in this city."

The movie's success also speaks to another reality — about half of all DVDs sold in Brazil are pirated copies.

Rio state Gov. Sergio Cabral was forced to deny watching a pirated version after reports circulated that he was demanding better vehicles for police because the movie showed officers stealing cars just to get parts.

Producers quickly provided Cabral with a special screening of the official version, which led the governor to declare the film a "shock of reality."

Then he came under more pressure for his apparent endorsement, and later insisted that Rio police do not behave the way they are depicted in "Elite Squad."