City of God

As mentioned, my family and I just watched City of God tonight, and I would highly recommend it to all of you. Its considered one of the best movies of all time (in the top 25 of IMDB’s best movie list). It’s a movie about one of the most dangerous favelas in Brazil, right outside of Rio de Janeiro. I was reading a bit about it after we finished the movie, and it has a really cool backstory (have tried to avoid spoilers below). The director wanted to make a film that was sort of a hybrid between a documentary and a movie. It’s all based on a true story but there was very little footage from the actual happenings to make a documentary. So the director settled on making a live-action movie that was as realistic and honest as possible to tell this story. So when casting for it, the director rounded up ~100 kids from the actual favela it’s based on and trained them in workshops for a few months to prepare them to film. (A few of these kids then went on to become famous actors in Brazil, a chance they would have never dreamt of given their background.) Not only did this make the portrayal very real by default, but the director would chat with all of the kids and hear about their experiences as runners, delivery boys, soldiers, etc for the various gangs in that favela, and incorporated those nuances into the cinematography. As an example, when filming a fight scene, as the kids prepared to run off to battle, they huddle to pray like they always do in real life before a gunfight. This wasn’t scripted at all, but the completely uncoached footage was included in the eventual movie.

They also used several other non-traditional techniques in working with the actors to accomplish their goal of an ultra-realistic depiction. One of the few professional actors that worked on the movie (the rest of the actors were just favela residents they found) was so committed to the role that he moved from his fancy house in Rio and lived in the favela for three months before filming to totally immerse himself. Another pair of actors have a scene where one is making fun of the other and there’s a lot of tension — the director made one of the characters bully the other one constantly for two weeks before filming that scene so that the animosity would seem real. This was so effective that the bullied actor almost quit the role because he was so fed up with it.

All in all, this is a great movie, and for the reasons above and many others, I would recommend giving it a watch.