How ‘City of God’ Put Brazilian Cinema on the Map.

One of the greatest films of the 21st century has a complicated legacy.

the final scene of the 1991 film Boyz n the Hood, Doughboy (Ice Cube) talks about documentaries covering violent places around the world. Where’s the coverage in his world, South Central, Los Angeles? “Either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in the hood,” he says. A box office success and multiple Oscar nominee, this was the birth of the “hood film,” with subsequent movies trading South Central for Brooklyn, Paris, or Hackney, or even the term “hood” for “favela.” One of the best in the genre, City of God released in 2002, based on the book by Paulo Lins and directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. The ostensible protagonist Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) is trying, like everyone, to escape the violence of the Cidade de Deus in Rio de Janeiro. His dream of being a professional photographer grants his camera access to the inner lives of drug dealers, vigilantes, and everyone in between. After 20 years, there is no superlative too overwrought, no hype it fails to live up to; City of God is a masterpiece, an urgent plea from a forsaken part of Brazil that reinvented the entire country’s film industry.

The Brazilian have been around from the beginning, with the first box office hit in 1908, a short crime film entitled Estranguladores. By the 1930s, the country had its first movie star in Carmen Miranda, whose trip to New York to perform in a Broadway show was funded by the Brazilian government. Independent cinema emerged later with more challenging material, and by 1962, Brazil had its first Palme d'Or winner in O Pagador de Promessas (Keeper of Promises). This film was nominated for an Academy Award, a feat shared by later titles like O Quatrilho, Four Days in September, and Central Station. For all their disparate subject matter, these movies are dramas, with a narrow, art-house appeal. At the very least, their marketing doesn’t feature anyone waving around a gun.