"Have you lost your mind? You are just a kid!"

Rating: 10/10 (27 May 2012)

Brutally honest and crude, Fernando Meirielles movie, born and filmed in the Brazil slums, raises above pure cliché and inevitability. You can either be a hood, a policeman or a worker, routinely victimized and barely able to scrap a living. The experience is hard to watch at times and at others artful and fun. This is brilliant storytelling through the combination of editing, vision and narrative. The result is how personal the story becomes through the eyes of young Rocket, our protagonist photographer, whose simple desires seem to be cruelly thwarted as if this is what all kids in the favelas experience. Following the decades' trends, we see the rise and fall of the angry and insecure gangster, Ze Pequena, possibly the scariest of gangsters ever to make the big screen. Gritty and a real as it gets, City of God translates as a cool gangster film as well as a very well told universal story of survival.