City of God (Cidade de Deus), codirected by Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, is a film from Brazil that portrays the chaos of life in the slums of Río de Janeiro. The film is based on the novel of the same title by Paulo Lins, who lived in the slum for thirty years. Accordingly, the film is broken into titled segments, presumably chapters, with voiceovers by one of the characters, Rocket (played by Alexandre Rodrigues). Filmviewers who enjoy action films with a lot of violence may be disappointed in City of God for one reason--too much violence. The context of the fact-based film, explained in a voiceover at the beginning, is that a political decision was once made to relocate the unsightly, uneducated poor from the fashionable areas of Río to government housing on the very edge of town, but of course the areas are slums with few urban amenities. The subtext, however, is that the poor are unable to obtain decent income; for example, one boy works as a street fishpeddler after his father goes fishing. The attractive alternative is a life of crime involving drugs. The film spans two decades, the 1960s and the 1970s, showing that the poor become increasingly desperate over time. The Alliance for Progress, launched by the United States during the Kennedy administration, was a period of massive economic restructuring in which American corporations so dominated the economy that a Marxian analysis, known as dependencia theory, charged that Washington was creating economic satellites throughout Latin America. Similar to Our Lady of the Assassins (2001), which takes place in contemporary Medellín, Colombia, the City of God is a place where everyone has a gun, and those with guns do not hesitate to shoot those who wrong them. Police come into the City of God frequently due to snitches but, as a voiceover hints, fail to apprehend those who pay them off. Perhaps the most grotesque subplot involves a nine-year-old, Li'l Dice (played by Douglas Silva), who is told to wait outside a brothel, gun in hand, while teenagers known as the Tender Trio rob patrons at a brothel. His instructions are to shoot a window if police arrive. However, instead of following orders, Li'l Dice shoots a window, the Tender Trio flee, and the nine-year-old massacres the patrons of the brothel. Subsequently, known as Li'l Zé (played by Leandro Firmino da Hora), the mass murderer becomes a crimelord who gets increasingly violent as time goes on. The macho culture conveys a maxim that Descartes did not anticipate: "I've killed and robbed, so I'm a man." Interestingly, one of the academic exponents of dependencia theory, Fernando Cardoso, eventually became president of Brazil in the 1990s. City of God, thus, serves as a reminder of the horrors of the era of an unbridled economic exploitation that motivated the Brazilian public to reject American-backed rulers and to embrace a more democratic form of government. MH

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Cidade de Deus
by Paulo Lins