"Even though living in Rio de Janeiro, where we have to get used to all the violence, I also have this dream of getting out of the favelas.   Every young kid's dream around here is to say: "Mom, I'm going to take you out of here. The future belongs only to God, and I don't like to talk about it much, because so many things can happen, but I can now say that my life, practically began again after this film.  It sure meant a lot to me.  I've learnt things I never dreamed of learning. I know that the going gets rough for those who choose to try to live decently, but even so, my wish is that "We from the Movies' never ends and that it can continue to provide opportunities to many other young people living in the surrounding communities." Actor  Alexandre Rodrigues, who plays 'Rocket'

For us who live in the favelas and tenement housing projects and see young kids, seven or eight years old selling dope with guns in their hands everyday, it makes me happy to be able to help show that, although it might not seem so, life here is very sad, and we all wished that things could be different.  I think that if through this movie we manage to transmit this sort of sentiment to the public, it will be mainly because of the dedication of everyone who was involved in the project.  I would like for everyone who goes to see the movie to pay lots of attention to the excellent work done by everyone.  It was an excellent experience for me and one I will never forget, not only because of the fact of working in the movie, but because of the friendships that remain after the film all these important people I've met and am still meeting. Actor Leandro Firmino da Hora, who plays Li'l Ze

When Paulo Lins decided to write a novel about his people and the deprived suburb he grew up in Rio de Janeiro, he spent eight years interviewing and collecting data on the organisation of the drug traffic, that eventually produced a war that marked the history of the neighbourhood in the 1970-80s.  When Cia. Das Letras published the novel it quickly became a success of critics and a best-seller in Brazil.

Adapted for the big screen Bráulio Mantovani, with Fernando Meirelles as director, the film is hailed as one of the most important films of our time by critics and audiences worldwide.

"Reading City of God  was like a revelation," says Meirelles.  "A revelation of another side of my own country.  I believed I knew all about the social apartheid which existed in Brazil, until I read the book.  I realised that we, from the middle class, are unable to see what is going on right in front of our noses.  We have no idea of the abyss, which separates these two countries: Brazil and Brazil (sic).  State, laws, citizenship, police, education, perspective, and the future are all abstract concepts, mere smoke, when seen from the other side of this abyss."

To assemble the cast of nearly 110 kids, the director, Fernando Meirelles and the co-director Katia Lund created an interpretation workshop and worked with non-professional actors from different Rio de Janeiro communities during 8 months, before filming began. The lis laboratory process comparable only to that undertaken by Hector Babenco, while filming Pixote.

Such cast in the film lives a reality that is very close to their own, causing the veracity of their performance to sometimes remit us to a documentary.  Such veracity is what puts the audience within that universe.  This is what makes City of God a revealing film.

City of God is a co-production of 02 Filmes and of VideoFilmes.  Filming was made in nine weeks between the months of June and August 2001.  The production had a U$3,300,000 cost, 85% financed by 02 Filmes and the remaining by the audiovisual decree.

"Brazilian reality has surpassed the majority of attempts to portray it in fiction," says producer Walter Sales, who directed Central Station and Behind the Sun. "The acceleration of social decomposition has transformed violence into a banality. Few books have captured so completely this state of affairs (the Brazilian apartheid and outlawing of the favellas), as does, Cidade de Deus, by Paulo Lins. Written by a son of the favela, Cidade de Deus reveals, for the first time, how this ever increasing process of incrimination has ended by overflowing into drug dealing enterprises and the struggle for power in the hillside shantytowns. Cidade de Deus, the film by Fernando Meirelles, is an extremely powerful transposition of Paulo Lins' book.  With a tremendous impact, modern and visceral, the film counts almost exclusively on the acting abilities of youngsters coming from the favelas around Rio de Janeiro. Orchestrated by a director with profound knowledge of cinematographic grammar, Cidade de Deus renews Brazilian filmmaking, and offers the spectators the possibility of understanding the roots of social chaos that characterise our country today, a little better."

"I decided to make a movie which was true to the book: filmed from the inside of the favela out. A movie with no scenarios and no acting techniques, without even any professional actors, but with kids who live this reality, and who can transmit to others a little of what it feels like living on the other side of the tracks.  I was luckily able to find others crazy enough to dive into the project with the same passion as I.  We made the film out of sheer spite, gassed-up by enthusiasm.

"But City of God is not only about a Brazilian issue, but one that involves the whole world.  About societies which develop on the outskirts of our civilised world.  Of the opulence of the first world, a world that is no longer able to see the third or fourth world, on the other side, or deep down in the abyss."

screenwriter braulio mantovani
"I counted 350  characters in the 700 pages of City of God  and I probably missed a couple.  The book has at least 100 different stories.  Some long; others short; many of them interconnected; some begin and end in a few lines.  I think these numbers convey the size of the challenge I had to face, when in 1999, I accepted an invitation to write the screenplay adaptation of the novel by Paulo Lins.

Director Fernando Meirelles was in a hurry: he wanted to meet a deadline imposed by certain cultural incentive laws.  The date has escaped my memory.  I do remember though of having read the dialogues and of having written the first manuscript in two months.  It was more important to meet the deadline than to produce quality work.  We'd iron everything out later.

To my surprise, the screenplay I thought was just a rough draft was chosen to participate in the Sundance Rio Film Laboratory and awarded a prize promoted by the Motion Picture Association and Writers Guild of America.  Apparently this first draft was not as precarious as I had thought.  Even so, we wrote another eleven versions, made changes during the filming and re-wrote parts of the narration when editing.

I wrote the script, but the author of the project has always been Fernando Meirelles.  He followed all the stages and screenplay versions closely.  He was a partner, who rescued me more than once.  When co--director Katia Lund entered the project, she also entered into the screenplay.  She solved at least one of the narrative problems that had been dogging us form the start.  Then came the actors, with their improvisations and invented dialogues.  To see them acting in the film makes up for all the small frustrations which occur when transcribing written words to celluloid.  Finally Paulo Lins himself gave his contribution in the final adjustments of the narrative test.

There were many collaborators.  I feel a little embarrassed in signing the screenplay alone.  But just a little.  The fact is that transcribing the book to cinema demanded a complex and risky narrative "architecture" that is without a doubt, of my doing.  The screenplay is mostly criticized for it's "manneristic virtuosity".  It could be that this criticism is pertinent in relation to the screenplay, but not for the movie itself.  And what counts here is what we see on the screen."

co-director katia lund
"When I finished reading Paulo Lins' book "City of God", it was still unfinished and unpublished.  I would be interviewing Paulo Lins that afternoon in 1997 for a documentary which I was directing with João Salles about the war between drug dealers and police in Rio's favelas.  I closed the book thinking to myself "This is the most important book in recent Brazilian history".

Not only is the book an epic in it's own right, but in Brazil, where education is hardly accessible to the poor, Paulo's book is a rare glimpse, an unadorned peek at the reality of the favela, so utterly misunderstood by outsiders.  Very few people raised in favelas have ever had the opportunity to tell their own story, much less write it with such expertise, talent, poetic form and realistic detail.

In early 2000, when Fernando invited me to participate at the project, I knew that this would be the greatest responsibility and the most wonderful challenge I could ever have hoped for.  Fernando already had completed the fourth draft of the script, so he and I decided to start working together by tackling two priorities:

1) finding ways to get our narrator more involved in the action and emotion of the film and,
2) determining a strategy for casting.

By the time shooting began in mid-2001, we had worked on approximately ten new versions of the script with Brãulio Mantovani, the screenwriter.  We wanted to show the narrator, Buscapé (Rocket), struggling to survive while walking a tight rope in the crossfire between police and dealers.  We needed him to be less of an observer and more of a vulnerable participant in the dangers and temptations around him.

Buscapé (Rocket) became more central as he became the brother of one of the outlaws, his home was broken into by the police, he was coerced to take pictures of the dealers, his photo was run on the front page of a major newspaper, he confronted the journalist who stole his photo, and ran risks for the sake of adolescent love.  In the book, Buscapé (Rocket) is based on a real person, a friend of Paulo's.  In the movie however, Buscapé (Rocket) the photographer, is based on Paulo Lins.

The casting process was a challenge and we knew it would define or undermine the strength of the film.  We opted, therefore, not to cast traditional actors but to research, discover and prepare a cast of non-professional adolescent boys from poor communities who could instinctively understand and apply favela slang, body language, attitudes and feelings - bringing to the screen a universe of realism similar to that portrayed in Paulo Lins' book.  We gave ourselves a year to do this.

We started out by going into neighbourhoods around Rio and videotaping interviews with 2000 candidates.  From these tapes, Fernando and I selected 200 boys to participate in an acting workshop we taught with Guti Fraga, a professional actor who maintains a theatre group in Favela Vinigal.  We called the workshop "Nós do Cinema" or "We from the Movies".  Later, these boys would be selected and prepared for specific scenes with another acting coach, Fatima Toledo.

The acting approach was based on improvisation.  We wanted to avoid theatrical and traditional "acting" techniques.  We worked on all of the actor's scenes, but never gave them scripts to memorize.  We would give them the idea of a situation and each boy's intentions in that situation, and see what they would come up with.  They were free to create their own words and actions.  We had a camera around at all times so that the boys would forget about it eventually.  We didn't want the actors memorizing lines, hitting camera marks or worrying about repeating the action exactly the same way on Take 2, 3 or 4.  We wanted them to live the scene, freely and spontaneously.

This meant the camera would have to adapt to the actors, which means, we had indirectly opted for a documentary style of shooting where the camera would have to chase the action.  Rarely was the action set up for the camera.  The focus puller would sometimes be late or early and the framing would not be perfect, but those flaws were actually contributing to the feeling of "realism".

After the end of principal photography, we wanted to stay close to our cast so we continued "We from the Movies".  Tutoring was made available to the boys who were falling behind in school.  On the weekends, the group would gather to talk about different film subjects like cinematography (with Cesar Charlone) or sound recording (with Paul Ricardo), and other members of the crew they knew well from the shoot.  Six months later, the boys are preparing to make two short films of their own, with the support of some production companies that have asked to become involved in the project."

Read the interview with director Fernando Meirelles
Read the views of the cinematographer, editor, art director and composers
Read Points of View on the film