The Other Side of the City

Five years ago, Fernando Meirelles' visually hyperkinetic Brazilian gangster film City of God floored international viewers with its unflinchingly violent depiction of life in the favelas, Rio's notorious hillside slums. In retrospect, that film is beginning to seem like the Do the Right Thing of an emerging favela micro-genre. Just as Spike Lee's masterpiece led to an early '90s wave of gritty American inner-city crime tales from directors like John Singleton and the Hughes brothers, Meirelles' film has prompted a similar explosion of engrossing stories about Brazil's idiosyncratic ghettos. City of God's direct successor was City of Men, a popular TV series featuring City of God actors Darlan Cunha and Douglas Silva in new roles (it's now available on DVD in the US from Palm Pictures). Meanwhile, the 2005 documentary Favela Rising explored music as an alternative to gangs, and Jose Padilha's new film Elite Squad, which just won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, looks at favela violence through the lens of Brazil's ruthless paramilitary police force.

Now comes City of Men, the feature film. Directed by Paulo Morelli, a longtime collaborator of Meirelles (who produced), it's pointedly not, as Morelli puts it, "City of God 2." Instead, he sees it as a companion piece. "I decided to make a humane story, not a violent story," he explains. Therefore, while City of Men shares City of God's handheld camera work, real locations, and improvised acting approach, it focuses less on the gangsters than on the ordinary favela residents who scurry for cover whenever gunshots ring out—only to emerge from their hiding places and go about their business the moment the violence subsides.

Morelli, who had never entered a favela before filming his first episode for the TV show, experienced this kind of behavior firsthand on set. "One day I was filming in a community dominated by a dealer. The moment I started, [I heard] a gun—ba ba ba ba—and everybody disappeared from the streets. Not more than one minute later, everything returned to normality—the kids riding bicycles. It's very normal. OK, you have to hide yourself when the shots start, but OK, it stops, and OK, let's go."

Against this backdrop, lifelong friends Ace (Silva) and Wallace (Cunha), who were 12 when the TV series began, must navigate the challenges of impending adulthood. The issue of fatherlessness is critical for these characters, as in so many stories from American ghettoes. Both boys grew up not knowing their fathers, and as they turn 18, Wallace, seeking to understand himself better, goes searching for his father, while Ace is forced to accept the responsibility of being a new father himself. With the help of a rather tidy backstory, the identities of both boys' fathers are eventually revealed, leading to a climactic hillside confrontation in the midst of a gang war. But as they face one another, the bullets are flying somewhere up the hill, out of the frame, emphasizing that City of Men is interested less in the spectacle of rival gangs duking it out in their hilly shantytowns than in the moral question of whether it's possible to be a good person while living in a war zone.

Morelli thinks it is possible. "The people who live in the favela are under a kind of dictatorship," he says. "You have a whole community which is composed of good people, living in the middle of this social war." But rather try to escape the favelas, he hopes that people can find a way to "live better in this place." He notes that both Cunha and Silva have elected to remain in the poor neighborhoods where they grow up, despite considerable wealth and success relative to their friends. In time, perhaps, favela denizens can break the cycle by becoming filmmakers themselves, exploring the many corners and crevices of their communities and broadening international perception of what favela life actually entails. As Morelli points out, much of the cast was drawn from a favela acting school called Nós do Morro ("We from the Hill"), while Meirelles recently founded a new school for directors called Nós do Cinema.

Whether the fate of the favelas, programs like these seem like a good omen for the future of Brazilian film, which has benefited greatly in recent years from the contributions of filmmakers such as Morelli and Meirelles, and their São Paulo-based production company O2 Filmes. They, along with colleagues like Walter Salles, are "a new generation of directors that wants a new cinema," Morelli says. Unlike the Cinema Novo films of the '60s, "It's not a cerebral, intellectual cinema. It's a more emotional cinema. We want to tell stories. I believe in this kind of cinema, that through telling a story you can go deeper into the meaning, instead of telling the meaning. And I believe that audiences in Brazil and worldwide recognize this, because storytelling is universal."