FILMED ON LOCATION: THE GANGS OF RIO DE JANEIRO

RIO DE JANEIRO - A CAST composed almost entirely of unknown actors, a
setting that is none too attractive, a lot of violence and no sex scenes.
If ever a studio wanted a formula for a film to fail, that would be it,"
said the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles.

As he was shooting in the slums here two years ago, Mr. Meirelles worried
about the commercial viability of the movie he was making. Yet "City of
God," which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, has become a
watershed cultural and political event in Brazil, and has now been seen by
more Brazilians than any film in nearly 30 years.

Every aspect, from its unblinking portrayal of criminality to its
innovative cinematography, has been endlessly analyzed and discussed, to
the point that Brazil's new president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is
reported to have said that seeing the movie made him change his policy on
public security.

"City of God" ("Cidade de Deus") takes its title from the best-selling
novel by Paulo Lins, which in turn is named for a gigantic housing project
built here in the 1960's and where some 120,000 people live today. Mr. Lins
grew up there, knew the real-life characters portrayed in the book and
film, and watched as drug gangs gained a stranglehold over the community.

"The book was the fruit of 30 years of observation and 10 years of
research," he said in an interview at his apartment in the middle-class
neighborhood where he now lives. "From the time I was a little kid, I
watched what was going on around me, so everything that appears in the book
is real, and that reality is exactly what the filmmakers wanted to capture."

When "Cidade de Deus" was published in 1997, it became an immediate
critical and popular success in Brazil, in large part because it showed
slum life from the inside - and did so without condemning the people who
live there. A friend of Mr. Meirelles gave the director a copy of the book
with the suggestion that it might make a good movie.

As it happened, Mr. Meirelles (pronounced mere-ELLIES), who is 47, was then
at a crossroads in his career. He had always wanted to make feature films,
and had directed several television programs and documentaries, but had
drifted into advertising and become probably the most successful director
of commercials in Brazil.

"I had won Clio awards and all the other prizes you can win, but I was at
that point when you start asking if there isn't something more," he recalled.

Mr. Meirelles's proposal to film "City of God" was one of eight that Mr.
Lins received, including some from directors much better known and with
experience filming in Rio's favelas, or hillside squatter slums. But when
Mr. Meirelles outlined his calculatedly risky plan to cast amateurs from
Cidade de Deus and other slum neighborhoods, the balance shifted.

"It was the idea of using actors from the favelas that really moved me and
won me over," Mr. Lins said. "The money was almost the same in all of the
offers, but Fernando's vision of the project was the most interesting."

Once that hurdle was overcome, the sheer Dickensian sweep of the novel
offered Mr. Meirelles his next challenge. At 550 pages, "City of God" has
nearly 300 characters and covers three decades in the slum's history: an
early 160-page draft of the script won a prize at a Sundance Institute
workshop held in Brazil, but even so, a dozen drafts were required before a
filmable version was completed.

As a white raised in a middle-class Sao Paulo neighborhood, Mr. Meirelles
faced an additional problem, that of credibility. The American equivalent
of the situation he confronted would be a native of the Upper West Side of
New York City deciding to go into Los Angeles' South Central to make a
movie about black gangs and expecting to be received with open arms.

To ease his way, Mr. Meirelles decided to enlist a co-director, Katia Lund.
Originally from Sao Paulo, Ms. Lund is of Norwegian descent and a Brown
University graduate but had made several Brazilian rap videos in the
favelas and had also filmed "News From a Private War," a highly praised
documentary about the drug gangs of Rio's slums.

"That whole experience was an eye-opener for me, and I wanted to know what
was happening and why no one was doing anything about it," she said. "I
believe that people change through emotional rather than intellectual
understanding, and since a feature film like this offers a way to reach
many more people in a much more direct way than a documentary, I welcomed
the chance to get involved."

With Ms. Lund's help, Mr. Meirelles set up an acting school in a favela in
Rio, without letting residents know that they were in fact auditioning for
a movie. For nearly a year, 200 students drawn from an initial pool of
2,000 attended acting classes twice a week, rehearsing scenes with a camera
rolling so as "to get them used to the idea," Mr. Meirelles said.

Of the cast chosen, only Matheus Nachtergaele, who plays the drug dealer
Sandro Cenoura, is a professional actor. Leandro Firmino da Hora, widely
praised in the chilling role of the psychotic drug dealer Ze Pequeno, is a
23-year-old slum dweller who had never acted before; the part of Mane
Galinha, a bus driver who vows to take revenge against the gangs after they
rape his girlfriend, went to the samba singer Seu Jorge.

Mr. Meirelles also took gambles on the technical side, such as filming with
16- and 35-millimeter cameras at the same time, then converting the film to
digital video and modifying the color tones before transferring the video
back to 35-millimeter film. Those increasingly colder, washed-out hues,
combined with extensive use of hand-held cameras, ended up giving "City of
God" a deliberately dizzying and disorienting feel.

"When you see the movie from start to finish, it seems like the director
and crew are unlearning everything you're supposed to know about making a
film," Mr. Meirelles said. "I wanted it to look like we were losing
control, because as time went on the state was losing control of the area
to the drug dealers, and that only leads to chaos."

Though happy with the result, Mr. Meirelles still had his doubts about the
public's reaction before "City of God" opened in Brazil in late August.
Brazilian moviegoers tend to favor big-budget American movies with plenty
of special effects, like "Spider-Man" or "Men in Black," and with homegrown
fare, they usually prefer frothy comedies starring Brazilian soap opera stars.

But for the last two years, Rio de Janeiro has been under growing assault
by drug lords with names like L'il Ze, Elias the Madman and Little Freddie
Seashore. In a show of strength early in October, their gangs successfully
brought normal daily life to a halt here when they ordered businesses,
stores, schools, bus lines and banks throughout the city, including in chic
neighborhoods like Ipanema and Copacabana, to close their doors.

In this environment, "City of God" has served as "a wake-up call for
Brazilians who haven't wanted to face this problem," said Ms. Lund.

The resulting debate has been emotional and often ferocious. Detractors
like Alba Zaluar, the anthropologist who had sponsored Mr. Lins's research
and urged him to write his book, complained that the film version of "City
of God" was merely recycling the stereotypes "that foreigners expect to
see: a country of hungry and abandoned children, of African poverty, of
filth and misery, violent."

More typical was the reaction of the veteran film director Arnaldo Jabor,
who praised "City of God" for opening "a hole in the national
consciousness" that "forces us into the muck, into the slaughterhouse, into
everything we hate to see." The movie, he added, shows the world "that hell
is here, just behind Ipanema."

Some social commentators have accused "City of God" of both glamorizing and
devaluing the bloodshed and brutality that are a daily part of life in
Rio's slums, a notion Mr. Meirelles said he found ridiculous. One scene in
particular, a young boy's cruel rite of passage into adult gang life, has
horrified audiences and become an emblem of the social ills that plague
Brazil's showcase city.

"But it is a violence that is intended to generate reflection, not the kind
of delight you see in a particular kind of American action film that takes
pleasure in showing violence," he said. "In `Mission Impossible,' Tom
Cruise kills something like 30 people, yet you don't feel you are in the
presence of an assassin because it's all made to look so pretty and
exciting. Here I put the violence in the spectator's head and let them
complete the image."

Despite all the controversy, "City of God" has been chosen as Brazil's
entry for the Academy Award for best foreign film and has received a Golden
Globe nomination for best foreign language film. As for Mr. Meirelles, he
is now working on what he describes as "a dramatic comedy about
globalization" even as his countrymen continue to argue about the causes of
crime and poverty and their solutions.

"I've seen a lot of changes in attitude over the past year, a
transformation from the inside out," he said. "Society was asleep, not
wanting to recognize this problem, but now it is not, and if my movie has
played a small part in that awakening, then I'm pleased."