City of God

This is one of the best pictures that I have seen this year…okay probably ever. The guy who put this together has mastered the art of story telling. Where the film starts is where it ends. And that is a story within itself. Then he weaves together a tapestry of characters moving seamlessly back and forth from person to person from location to locations as he masterfully gives you a glimpse into the lives of the people who will make up this complex story. 

There are tales about poverty and race relations in the early seventies and eighties and Brazil’s attempt to deal with these issues. Then there are the lives of a few young men who lived in these difficult circumstances but who somehow managed to create a life albeit of crime out of this existence. He takes you through these lives and the families in which they lived and the struggles they endured as well as the bonds they created. He shows you how important it is to begin to think strategically at a young age and how this can be a valuable asset even if in this case it is in a life on the other side of the law. He demonstrates how young men made decisions some for the better others for the worse and how these decisions affected their lives. He shows you how change happens and how events seemingly unrelated can lead to changes in the lives of young people that are almost irreversible. He tells stories about growing up and falling in love and making love or at least trying to. He tells stories about the racial divide as well as the wealth gaps that exist in society. He tells tales of the life that many must navigate to survive and the systems they establish to make it work. The story is reminiscent of black hawk down at least in the communication networks that were set up to alert the residents when raids were about to take place. This time though, the ecosystem was created to move ‘product’. The introduction of an unlikely hero is also interesting as is the emergence of one who will perhaps not necessarily be seen as one although in many cases the challenge is really just to survive and live to tell the tale. 

If I were to summarize the movie with a few words I would say, the chicken, the camera and the gun!