‘City of God’ is not only my favourite film, it’s also my favourite book. I first saw the film version around the time it came out in 2002 and immediately I was hooked. I’ve always been drawn to films focused on gang culture and even though ‘City of God’ isn’t directly about gangs, it gives insight into Brazilian favela culture and how local gangs affect that.
At the time of the films release, it seemed to me one of the most in-depth studies and observations of favela life that I had come across. The fact it was the cast is made up of people from the Cidade de Deus Favela – where the author, Paulo Lins, grew up and based his novel – added so much authenticity to it as a body of work. Later down the line, I found out that the film was based on a book, ‘City of God’, so I found myself a secondhand copy on eBay and was hooked. I feel that the book is better than the film, simply because there is so more detail to it. There are about four times as many narratives in the book as there are in the film version.
What makes it such a cool story is the way it tells of so many different experiences of the people that lived in Cidade de Deus. The writer of the book, Paulo Lins, is essentially one of the characters in the story, Rocket. In the film, Rocket is an aspiring photographer; a child that grows up in the favela seeking to make his dream an actuality. In actual fact, Paulo Lins was that guy, but he grew up to be a journalist instead. Raised in the City of God favela, he acknowledges that his book was made up of “10 years of research and 30 years of life experience,” making it as much memoir as novel. “Everything that happened in that book is drawn from reality, as are its nearly 300 characters.”
Being a journalist myself, this really inspired me to see the impact one man’s study can have on a country’s output to the world. It’s incredible to me the fact that he wrote the book after interviewing the residents of the favela it’s based on. In Larry Rohter’s profile of Lins in the New York Times, he identified that the writer had been, “hired as a researcher by a sociologist investigating crime and poverty in the favelas, Mr. Lins decided the information he was gathering could just as easily be made into literature.” There are stories in the book and the film that are based on real events in Lin’s community. The manner in which he’s constructed the story is beautiful and the creators of the film did the novel justice; the imagery and visuals of the film are stunning, in addition to amazing casting.
Brazil as a country is incredible, I’ve been to Rio twice and it’s one of my favourite three cities in the world. I feel a massive attraction to the city and I think that all began with ‘City of God’. Having watched the film twenty times before I ever entered Brazil and read the book shortly after my second visit, ‘City of God’ means a lot to me. My birthday tradition is to wake up and watch the film in bed, which I’ve been doing for around five years now.
If you’ve never read the book or watched City Of God, please fix that. It’s so amazing!
