Open TV
Young Dadinho (little dice) was, at 10 years of age, in his first formal job. Dadinho, at the gates of a suburban motel, was asked to shoot the motel’s luminous sign at the first sight of the police. Inside the motel an armed robbery was taking place. After a few minutes of boredom, Dadinho deceptively shoots the sign, his partners quickly flee the crime scene, and the audience of City of God [2002] is confronted with a 10 year old kid indiscriminatingly killing motel workers and middle class Brazilians while having a good time. A disturbing but very real scene in what is staged as the birth of gang violence in Río de Janeiro, Brazil.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund succeeded in directing a film that not only engages its audience with an interesting story and its fast-paced aesthetics, but also conveys “what happens inside the slums,” as Meirelles himself pointed out in an interview for the Atlanta Journal Constitution in January 2003. In the same interview, Meirelles also confesses being influenced by Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Robert Altman. It is certainly this influence, added to Lund’s experience directing some of the most influential and outspoken [Brazilian] rock and hip-hop music videos, that give City of God its unique visual language. Despite of being highly innovative, this style does not escape the hyper-real Latin American style and, on the contrary, might be even taken as an evolution of the urban-violent storytelling trend that is common among artists in the region.
The fact that urban violence is the focus of many Latin American films is no coincidence. Various cities in the area have been classified as the most dangerous in the globe, a situation that transforms its children in the easiest target of the apparatus of violence. Such is the case of Caracas, Venezuela, the capital of a privileged oil-rich nation [fifth larger exporter in the world], but one that nevertheless hasn’t escaped the wave of corruption that turned the region upside down in the past four decades. The opening of Elia Schneider’s Glue Sniffer [1999] bluntly denounces the situation in which Venezuela’s 600,000 homeless children dwell, most of them living in the roughest streets of Caracas while consistently being abused by police and drug lords alike. Schneider’s film, as most of this genre, flirts with fiction and documentary, driving the audience through a nightmare in which kids have powerful guns and no love. A sad situation that is getting worse [if that is even conceivable], since the government is determined to shut down as many sources of dissent as possible, limiting the ability of Venezuelan citizens to understand what is really happening in their own country: independent media is being replaced by state-sponsored propaganda (click here to read more).
Back to Brazil [where constructive and blunt criticism is possible], the creators of City of God came up with a line extension for TV [City of Men] that has been running for a while now in the US via Sundance Channel. The series is simply amazing TV, part drama, part comedy, part documentary; it certainly pushes the boundaries of intelligent entertainment and deserves your attention. Here is a preview of the first episode… enjoy.