City of God

Fernando Meirelles' City of God announces its energy in its opening minute and never once slows down to apologize for it. That restlessness is a formal choice, not a stylistic flourish: the film tracks roughly two decades in Rio de Janeiro's Cidade de Deus housing project through the eyes of an aspiring photographer trying to stay a bystander to a drug war that keeps recruiting children before they're old enough to understand what they're being recruited into.

The film's structure — nested vignettes, narrators who die and hand off the story to someone else, timelines that double back to reveal the same event from a different angle — mimics the way violence actually spreads through a community: not as a single event but as an inheritance, passed from one kid to the next, each one convinced this time it will be different.

What keeps City of God from becoming exploitation is its insistence, visual and structural, that its subjects are children first — playing football, chasing girls, taking photographs — for exactly as long as the world around them allows it, and not one frame longer.

— Amir Morsali, BIPA Editorial