Imagine kids of age 5 to 10 behaving like gangsters, would you laugh at them or would you take all of them seriously? We'll if you watch "City of God" you definitely would take it seriously, because these kids will scare you like anything. This movie is set in the 6os and it talks about the organized crimes and the drugs business happening among the kids of the Cidade de Deus suburb of Rio de Janeiro. This is one of my favorite gangster films, the fact that its based on real life makes it much more powerful.
The movie is a narration of a kid who stays in that locality his name is Rocket. He like his brother wants to become a gangster, but his interest will go into photography and later he chooses to become a professional photographer. The movie is also a scary reminder of what happens to kids if they are not taken care of properly. The director of the film Fernando Meirelles, who took the stories from that locality and made one of the top 100 films of all time. This movie is very brave, the director chose to use the kids from Cidade de Deus who were involved in gangs to act in the film. Because of this the film became much more organic and memorable.
One of the memorable characters of the film is Li'l Dice, he is one of the local kids trying to break into crimes. His origin story is epic, we can literally see his hunger for blood. The movie spends a great deal of its time telling about this character. Later, we see Li'l Dice's transformation into Li'l Ze. A ruthless blood thirsty gangster.
The most interesting things about this film is that, you can understand this film without the help of subtitles. Every single scene is shot in a way to make us understand with the least amount of effort. The use of composition and the colors tells us what is happening in the scene without the use of the language. Even though the language of the film is Portuguese, the limited amount of dialogues and the use of camera to tell the story makes this film universal.
One cannot forget the scene where, Li'l Ze tells a kid to kill another kid if he wants to join the gang. This scenes is the most memorable to me. The acting done by these kids is world class, they all deserve praise. The documentary style directing used in this scene is very effective. This scene has all kinds of emotion wrapped into it. Here's the video of the scene.
The movie also shows the effect of drugs in the lives of the people living in these slums. The drugs was a reason for a lot of chaos and which also leads to the gang wars. The drugs business will bring in a lot of money and the money will give a lot of power in the hands of these kids. Powerful weapons, girls, jewelry will make everyone want to get piece of the drug business. The movie depicts it the most entertaining way.
Thank you for reading this post. This movie is not for everyone, if you are into gangster films and are looking for something really original and creative in the same genre then this is the film. Cheers !
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