Written by Lydia Collier-Wood
02/11/25
Film is one of the few ways we can experience an entirely different world, life experience and time, expanding our world view from the comfort of our sofa. While this is typically a representation, a mediated version of reality of constructed shots and editing, Fernando Mierelles’ and Katia Lund’s City of God does an excellent job at playing with this paradox.
The film is adapted from Paulo Lins’s 1997 novel, a semi-autobiographical account of the City of God housing project where he grew up. Lins spent eight years turning anthropological research and interviews into fiction that reads like reportage. Meirelles and Lund re-imagined his sprawling material through the eyes of Rocket, a boy from the favela with a budding passion for photography, whose life unfolds alongside the rise of gang warfare. The film’s non-linear structure splinters Rocket’s narration into overlapping timelines and intercuts stories of gang leaders, childhood friends, journalists and police, all orbiting the same neighbourhood, with the fragmentation mirroring the community itself.
Made for under four million dollars, it grossed over thirty times its budget worldwide and earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Cinematography. The film reached global acclaim, showing Brazilian filmmakers to be on par with the likes of Scorsese and Tarantino.
To understand why it hit so hard, some context helps. In the 1960s, Brazil entered decades of military rule, a time of rapid urbanisation and stark inequality. Favelas—informal settlements built as temporary housing—swelled into permanent, overcrowded mini-cities. The “Brazilian Miracle” of the 1970s brought economic growth without redistribution with wealth consolidated at the top, while brutality deepened on the margins. By the 1980s, drug trafficking and corruption had turned those peripheries into a minefield of gang wars.
Culturally, the film descends from Cinema Novo, a Brazilian movement whose directors sought to expose the poverty the middle class preferred not to see. City of God inherits that ethos but updates it for a global audience fluent in fast cuts, pop soundtracks and post-modern crime narratives. It was financed by Brazil’s biggest TV network, TV Globo, and O2 Filmes, then distributed internationally by Miramax the Weinstein company that built its reputation on provocative world cinema. That partnership placed City of God in a strange space between art-house credibility and mainstream spectacle.
Meirelles’ attempt at realism is apparent in that most of his cast were non-professional actors, drawn from favelas around Rio. They were trained in workshops rather than given a script, giving the dialogue an air of spontaneity. However, this only works because of the scaffolding behind it. The editor, Daniel Rezende, assembled the footage into something aggressively precise:
“If the situation is tense,” he said, “we speed it up and make it even tenser. If a character will matter later, we freeze the face to commit it to memory. If both things happen at once, we split the screen. If a badly made cut increases discomfort, we keep it.”
The result is a film that feels like it’s happening faster than you can process, mirroring the very lives it is presenting on screen. The film’s handheld camera and sun-bleached palette suggest documentary immediacy, but every frame has been engineered to replicate the sensory overload of the favela creating a constructed authenticity, a realism that admits its own manipulation.
The film’s restless style announces itself from the first frame. There is no establishing shot, but a flurry of flashes: knife, hand, stone each punctuated by a cut to black. A final photographic burst reveals Rocket with his camera, framed behind a lattice of bars that collapses inward until his image fills the screen. The sequence is in fact a flash-forward to near the film’s end, when Zé, Rocket’s foil, bribes the police after his gunfight with Ned. From the outset, the montage’s collision of speed and fragments signals that we’re entering a world defined by chaos. The first moment of calm arrives with the film’s inaugural mid-shot: a live chicken, tethered by its leg to a kitchen table. In the next cut the first true it breaks free, flapping frantically through the favela. In Brazilian slang, a ‘flying chicken’ describes something that soars briefly before crashing back to earth: its freedom is always short-lived. A low shot from the bird’s point of view catches a plate streaked with blood, a quiet reminder of where this is all heading. This sequence of tension and release becomes synonymous with the film’s style.
Meirelles then rewinds to the 1960s, signified by a distinct colour change, going from electric blue to dusty yellow. The camera steadies; the world opens with expansive blue skies appearing. We meet the Tender Trio: three small-time thieves whose antics become the neighbourhood’s founding myth. The sequence feels nostalgic: bright sunlight, pale timber houses, a ball bouncing through a goalpost. The smooth tracking shot that follows the Trio contrasts sharply with the frenetic cutting of the present day noting the shift their lives have taken. Despite this, the idyll is already tainted, their bandanas and revolvers evoke old Westerns, casting them as heroic outlaws. Childhood play will soon evolve into masculine performance with violence becoming a rite of passage. When the young Lil’ Dice grins, holding a gun beside a football, the two symbols innocence and destruction share the same frame indicative or the complex identity of these children.
Years later, the same neighbourhood reappears transformed. In “The Story of the Apartment,” the camera stops moving altogether. It watches, unmoving, as a single room passes from one dealer to the next over decades. Each dissolve erases a generation furniture disappears, walls darken, and the faces get younger. The once-lived-in space turns into a commodity to be inherited, not a home to be inhabited. In a film obsessed with movement, this stillness lands powerfully, symbolic of social mobility that has vanished.
After this we come to one of the film’s most heartbreaking scenes and a marker of the final loss of innocence: Bené’s death. One of the film’s few characters with genuine warmth, Bené dreams of leaving the City of God behind to open a photography shop and live quietly with his girlfriend, a fantasy of stability that feels almost absurd in this world. The nightclub scene where he dies collapses this, the camera jerks and spins through a blur of bodies as flashing lights fracture the image, disorientating both characters and audience. The frame is drenched in the film’s signature blue until, for a moment, Bené appears bathed in gold a fragile glow that isolates him as the moral centre of an amoral world. Seconds later, he is gone. In a touching moment before the shooting, he gives Rocket his camera, a gift that becomes a ticket out, the only tool capable of transforming survival into mobility. Yet that freedom is still tethered to material exchange: the camera, an object of value and materialism. The camera literally reframes his life, but the system that killed Bené remains the same.
The film ends cyclically. Rocket’s photography lifts him out of the favela, but his escape, although hopeful, is not representative of the many. The closing shots return to the Runts, a gaggle of children plotting their next killings, laughing as they wander through the same streets that trapped those before them. The cycle continues, only this time the faces are younger. City of God offers no real resolution; just because one person escapes does not mean the world has changed. Two decades later, Brazil’s social inequalities remain pervasive. Around 5 percent of the population controls nearly half of the nation’s wealth, and in Rio, favelas still account for almost a quarter of the city’s housing. Police raids and gang violence continue to shape everyday life, and although government “pacification” programmes once promised reform, most have long since been abandoned. Whilst some might argue the film is exploitative, I don’t believe Meirelles glamorises the violence. Instead, he exposes the conditions that make it inevitable, showing how it seeps into ordinary life. City of God sheds light on a reality many would rather ignore, forcing attention rather than asking for sympathy.
At its core, City of God is undeniably about violence not just as a spectacle, but its roots are in Brazil’s enduring inequality. Meirelles translates these social fractures into cinema, which is no mean feat. That the film was later distributed by Miramax adds another layer: a story of Brazilian poverty reaching global screens through the very mechanisms of global capital. In exposing how violence is produced, performed, and packaged, City of God reminds us that realism in cinema is never neutral; it is always a matter of who gets to hold the camera, and who is trapped inside the shot.
Bibliography
Meirelles, F. & Lund, K. (dirs.) (2002) City of God (Cidade de Deus).
Bazin, A. (1967) What is Cinema? Vol. 1. Translated by H. Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bentes, I. (2004) ‘City of God and the Invention of the Favela’, in Nagib, L. (ed.) The New Brazilian Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 121–131.
Nagib, L. (2007) Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London: I.B. Tauris.
Mason, P. H. (2005) ‘City of God: The Representation of Violence in Brazilian Cinema’, Screen, 46(4), pp. 451–457.
Lins, P. (1997) City of God (Cidade de Deus). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
World Bank (2023) Gini Index (World Bank Estimate) – Brazil. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=BR (Accessed: [24/10/25]).
Retrospect Journal 