Reel life

摘要

When City of God, co-directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, was released in 2002, throwing Rio de Janeiro's slum gang violence into the spotlight, it added to the international success that Brazilian cinema had achieved a few years earlier with Central Station (1998), directed by Walter Salles. Made in the late '90s, with the creation of national incentives that had stimulated film production in Brazil after a period of scarcity, these and other films drew attention to the massive social injustice and economic disparities of Brazilian cities that seemed inevitably to lead to violence. Reclaiming spaces that had been symbolic in cinematic representations of the past, the favelas (as well as the rural areas of the arid sertao, the backlands in the north-east interior) became the stage for the performance of a variety of dramas in which the connecting thread was the peripheral spaces and places that turned out to be more than a mere backdrop for the films.