`Once Upon A Time In America' for the year 2000

Rating: Null/10 (4 March 2004)

When violence is a language and survival a word written in blood, when children kill and get killed by the sound of laughter, life runs faster than a chicken running away from the knife. There, in the City Of God. `Cidade De Deus' (City Of God) is the name of a multi-family social housing project constructed in the sixties, that became a huge slum quarter (`favela') in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and a center for drug traffic in Brasil. The film, by the same name, makes the raw and fascinating portrait of the transformation of the kids from the block into mega drug dealers of the seventies and early eighties. From the eyes of Buscapé (Alexandro Rodrigues), a poor, sensitive black kid growing in that universe of violence, we see the gathering of the pieces of rubble that make a great real story. Buscapé has the dream of becoming a photographer, and his lack of courage to enter in a life of crime will ultimately place him in the center of one of the biggest gang wars ever to occur in the city of Rio. In the space between the lines lies a beautiful story that is a truthful register of the growth of urban inhumanity. The city that grows and surrounds the quarter that has no light, no schools and no sanitation, forgotten by the government. It's that people with no hope or jobs that slowly penetrates into crime, from small robberies into achieving the full majority: drugs. And weapons. The film dissects the structure of violence, the traffic and the corruption from whence it feeds from. But beyond that, the story shown is much more than a superficial aesthetic display of crime. The story is transmitted in the small details, in gestures of guilt, corruption, friendship. The realism of the language and images is complete, without ideological sermons. This is `Once Upon A Time In America' for the year 2000. This is a great film.