City of God: an armed childhood

It opens with a knife being sharpened to the rhythm of samba and a chicken escaping lunch — and within three minutes City of God has taught you its grammar: restless camera, colour blown out by sun, editing that cuts on impulse. By the time the chicken stops between Rocket and Li’l Zé’s gang, the film has already stated its theme: someone in the middle, trying not to die.

The adaptation of Paulo Lins’s novel follows three decades of a Rio favela, from the 1960s to the early 1980s, changing its look with each era — nostalgic gold, seventies psychedelia, the dirty grain of war. Daniel Rezende edits it all as a flow of memory, with chapters and detours, without ever losing the thread.

The cast, largely first-timers trained in acting workshops, gives the film its physical truth. Leandro Firmino turns Li’l Zé into a study of power without varnish; Alexandre Rodrigues holds the film together with the active passivity of someone who watches — and photographs.

What lasts

Accused at the time of aestheticising violence, the film answered with influence: it opened doors abroad for Brazilian cinema, earned four Oscar nominations and trained a generation of technicians and actors. Seen today, it impresses less by shock than by control — every formal decision in the service of a question Brazil still has not answered.