Cinema - The Rough Guide to Brazil - page 666

City of God and beyond
Cidade de Deus (“City of God”), Fernando Meirelles's stunning directorial debut
released in 2003, tells the story of a real Rio favela from its early days in the 1960s to
the mid-1980s. It is a remarkable film. The cast is largely amateur, drawn from Cidade
de Deus itself, with a few professional actors thrown in (including the mesmerizing
Matheus Nachtergaele as a gunrunning gangster, also to be seen in an almost equally
memorable performance as a cold-blooded terrorist in Four Days in September ).
Meirelles came to cinema from shooting mainly commercials and music videos for
television, and it shows, with his jumpy editing and distinctive, stylish use of colour
and sound. Cidade dos Homens (“City of Men”) was the less fêted 2007 follow-up
directed by Paulo Morelli, but is just as compelling.
Brazil's next international hit, Tropa de Elite (“Elite Troop”), directed by José Padilha
in 2008, had the same theme. Its extremely violent portrayal of Rio's elite anti-narcotics
police unit was mistakenly criticized as fascistic by some reviewers, but the film is in
fact ethnographically accurate in its portrayal of police corruption, the nexus between
violence, politics and organized crime in Rio, and the complex, intimate yet distant
relationship between Rio's middle and working classes, sharing the same urban space
but in wholly different ways.
Salles and Meirelles are examples of the heights to which Brazilian cinema can now
reach. Yet as they would be the first to admit, they stand on the shoulders of
predecessors who for over fifty years struggled to create what is now the liveliest and
most innovative national cinema in South America.