by MATTHEW HAYS

Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles snaps his fingers furiously as he describes making City of God. “We only had eight weeks to make this epic,” he says. “We had to move along, like that. The movie had to go along at a very fast pace.”

The man is right, it does. And the film, based on Paulo Lins’ landmark bit of Brazilian nonfiction, Cidade de Deus, has been garnering widespread critical acclaim as one of the very best films of the year, highlighting the plight of Brazil’s urban street urchin population. Every year, thousands of Brazil’s orphans are pushed out into the street, where they’re forced to fend for themselves. Understandably, most of these kids end up taking the only opportunity offered them: working for one of many drug lords.

Now, sitting down to discuss the film at the Toronto International Film Fest, Meirelles is basking in the warm glow of critical adulation and the fact that the film has opened to overwhelming box office in its native land. “We opened with only 100 copies last weekend, thinking it would do okay, what with no known actors in it,” he explains. “We’re going to 140 copies for next weekend. We hoped to sell 600,000 tickets eventually. We’ve already sold 500,000, and it hasn’t even been playing for 10 days.”

What’s in a name?

That City of God’s title is ironic is pretty much a given, considering its unbelievably harsh subject. The film is epic in scope, taking on a broad cast of characters as they navigate their way through the merciless, unforgiving life that faces the urban poor outcasts in Rio de Janeiro. Cidade de Deus is a housing project that began in the ’60s with the very best of intentions - and then, as many housing projects like it did around the world, backfired brutally. Police failed to offer proper support, the poor got poorer and the segregation of the city’s poor only made things more dire. Drug lords took over, and a kind of anarchy set in, where the toughest drug lords with the most guns called the shots. City of God focuses on two boys caught up in this mess: Rocket, a poor boy who is too frail to get involved with the mob but who realizes he can make a better living using his creativity with photography, and by selling his representations of the urban hell he’s living in. The other boy is Lil Dice, who has fantasies of becoming Rio’s most dangerous criminal. Both boys will succeed at their respective aspirations.

What Meirelles has done is to create a stunning stylistic tension within the film: like the best early work of Scorsese, the director employs frenetic, highly stylized camera work that is clearly expressionistic. He then juxtaposes that style with elements of realism, in particular cinéma-vérité documentary work. The result is the uneasy feel of much of Scorsese’s finest. (Sad, but true: City of God inadvertently points up so many of the faults inherent in Scorsese’s latest, Gangs of New York. Where God feels fresh, innovative and gritty, Gangs history-brought-to-you-by-Ralph-Lauren feels over-designed, too pretty and ultimately empty.)

“What I tried to do with cinematographer César Charlone was to create three different degrees to the film,” explains Meirelles. “The way we used the camera, the way we edited, the way we told the story, those things all change as the film progresses. In the first part of the film, we were using tripods and dollies. It was very steady, very under control. And when you go to the end of the film, it seems we’re losing control as the characters lose control. The space also loses control: at the beginning, even the houses seem orderly. The architecture shifts as the film progresses.

“By the end of the film, we aren’t respecting the rules any more either. The editing rules are broken, you see out of focus images. It seems like the crew is lost in the action. And that is exactly what we wanted.”

This shift, from control to anarchy, also extended to Meirelles’ directions for his actors. “In the beginning, I told the actors exactly where to go. In the end, they just went on the set and the camera man had to try to capture them, much like in a documentary. The camera man was left to try to capture as much as he could. So the film really has three different degrees of control. It’s basically about the descent into anarchy, about losing control.”

Taking page to screen

As Meirelles recounts, the shift from book to film script was not simple by any means. Lins’ source material is “entirely episodic,” as Meirelles describes it. “He presented a character and you’d follow that character around for 20 pages and then they die and then he’s onto another character. No structure at all, really. So to make the film we needed a main character, we needed some kind of central figures to guide us through. We also decided to break the film up into three periods [the late ’60s, the ’70s and the early ’80s], so you could understand the progression of events.”

Brilliant camera work and editing aren’t the only things getting high praise in City of God; Meirelles’ cunning casting of actual street children makes for a realism that is downright chilling. (Some of the sequences have armed kids blowing the hell out of each other.) “[A boy in the film] is played by a professional actor, as are all of the white characters and any characters over the age of 30. But the crucial part of the film was finding those kids. We found 60 of them, and we spent five or six months workshopping them. We were preparing them to act; at the same time, it worked as an exchange, because they taught us what it was really like to live in the slums. The thing that really struck me was how these kids had been touched by violent death. All had tales of brothers, friends, cousins - it’s impossible to live in that community without some connection to murder.”

The cast of kiddies soon bonded, Meirelles reports, and his connection to them has not ended. The filmmaker says he was committed to helping these kids use the film as a way to a better existence. “After the film we created a non-governmental organization that kept them together. They became very good friends.

“What we’ve done is to try to get them training with film production companies. During their various meetings, the kids have made two short films and a music video. We’re doing four episodes with them for Brazilian TV. It’s still only 60 boys we’re helping out of God knows how many, but at least we’re able to help them out.”

Meirelles also says the film meant employing some of the people caught up in the drug trade itself. “We had to make some negotiations with the drug dealers, because we wanted to shoot in their areas. They cut deals with us. They asked us to employ people from their neighbourhood. We had a few drug dealers working with us as consultants.”

Not shockingly, Meirelles does cite Scorsese as an influence. A recent favourite is Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, which he caught on the fest circuit. (“I loved it! You must see it,” he says.)

Moore or less

And that admiration would follow, when you hear Meirelles discuss the social problems that plague his native Brazil. “When I hear people talking about solutions, it’s often about the police or even the army. It’s about new ways to contain these children, and the populations they come from. The real solution is the opposite: include them in the society. If all those boys had opportunities, jobs, sports, schools, whatever, this wouldn’t be happening. They would join the regular ranks of the public. It’s like a career what the drug dealers offer them. The girls love those drug dealers. They don’t really have much money, but they’re respected. They’re respected and they have Nike sneakers. It’s about opportunity.”

The themes in City of God hearken back to Maids, a hit at Montreal’s World Film Festival two years ago that Meirelles codirected, about the dilemmas facing Brazilian domestic servants. “Both films are about exclusion and domestic apartheid. In Brazil, we have middle-class neighbourhoods, but we don’t want the other neighbourhood coming in. But really, it’s the same thing with the world generally. I have to take visas to come to Canada. People want to keep the Third World out. I think it’s very possible to think of this film on a global level.”

As heavy as City of God sounds - and sitting through it is definitely an emotionally wrenching experience - Meirelles says that making the film was the most positive experience of his life. “It was the best year of my life. Those boys were so excited by the project. They were there in the morning and wanted to stay all day long. There was such a great energy. It was only joy. All the crew was really into the movie.

“Before the film I was doing a lot of commercials, sometimes six a month. I finally went to Rio to work with those kids, and I realized I wasn’t happy doing those commercials - I just didn’t know it when I was in it. No more meetings, no more marketing people. What an experience! I loved it.” :

City of God opens Friday, Jan. 31

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