FILM CLUB: CITY OF GOD (OV)

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

FSK 16 | 128 minutes | Drama | Start: 08.05.2003 | Brazil 2002

A triumphant and breathtakingly truthful masterpiece about the brutal and self-destructive youth gangs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

In the favelas of Rio de Janiero, well-organized street gangs have been calling the shots for around three decades. From humble roughneck beginnings in the 1960s, a criminal hydra has grown that has long since organized local politics in the slums alongside drug dealing and gambling. Three young people are at the center of the plot: gang leader Benny (Phelipe Haagensen), respected by all because he sometimes solves conflicts without weapons, Benny's junior partner Lil' Dice, a psychopath of the highest order, and finally Rocket, who has swapped his gun for a camera.
This gripping and fast-paced ghetto epic, spanning three decades and generations, has a reputation like thunder before it for good reason. Fernando Meirelles created this visually stunning masterpiece based on a 700-page bestseller by Paulo Lins.
Through the eyes of amateur photographer Rocket, the story of the gangs in the slums of Rio de Janeiro is told from the sixties through the rampant gang wars of the seventies to the eighties, when the empire begins to crumble, focusing on gangster boss Benny and his psychopathic partner Lil'Dice as well as a hundred other young people.
Things are brutal in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, the so-called favelas. The three main characters give us a first-hand experience of the relentless everyday life under the Sugar Loaf between the late 1960s and early 1980s: there is the brutal Dadinho, who rises to become Rio's most hated drug baron, the shy and timid Buscapé, who becomes a photographer and thus involuntarily a chronicler of events, and finally the brave Mane Galinha, who swears ice-cold revenge on his girlfriend's rapist.