City of God

The second reason is the mirror image of the first.

The archive holds twelve films, from 1927 to 2019, covering the United States, Japan, Italy, Sweden, France, Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, India, Iran, South Korea and Hong Kong — and nothing at all from Latin America. Not one film from the whole of South or Central America. City of God is the least arguable candidate for that gap.

It forms a deliberate counterweight to today's other selection, Modern Times: 1936 against 2002, sixty-six years apart; one built on studio sets in Hollywood, one shot handheld on 16mm in real Rio favelas; one with almost no dialogue, one carried from beginning to end by narration and music; one a comedy, one a crime film.

But they are about the same thing: an ordinary person ground down by a machine he cannot influence. In Modern Times the machine is the assembly line, technology that counts only profit. In City of God the machine is the logic a neighbourhood ran on for twenty years — whoever picks up a gun first survives — and that logic is not decided by any single character.

Both are also films about the poor, by opposite methods. Chaplin grew up in the slums of Victorian London, became a millionaire, and filmed the poor with studio sets and choreography timed to the frame. Meirelles and Lund spent two years casting in Rio's favelas, and in the end almost every lead was someone who lived there, many of them acting for the first time.

The last reason is plainer: the 2000s currently hold a single film in the archive, In the Mood for Love, and it is Asian. With this one added, both ends of that decade are covered.

里约热内卢的西郊，有一个叫 Cidade de Deus 的地方——「上帝之城」。它不是自然长出来的：1960 年代，政府为了把市中心的棚户区迁走，在这里建起一片一模一样的安置住宅，四周什么都没有。

故事从 1960 年代末开始。三个少年在街上抢劫，只拿钱和煤气罐，还给自己立了规矩；一个叫 Buscapé（火箭）的男孩在旁边看着。他胆子小，怕事，想当摄影师。

十年后，同一片空地上出现了一批更小的孩子。他们比上一批更快、更狠、更不讲规矩。

影片用二十年时间，把这块地方怎么一步步变成一座由持枪少年统治的城，讲了一遍。旁白从头到尾都是 Buscapé——那个没拿枪、只拿着相机的人。

（这里不再往下说。这个故事的一半力量来自不知道谁会活到最后。）

How a documentary turned into a film

The starting point was not the novel but a documentary. In 1996 Kátia Lund handled production in Rio for Spike Lee's music video for Michael Jackson's "They Don't Care About Us", shot inside a favela. Until then she knew almost nothing about them.

In 1999 she co-directed, with João Moreira Salles, the documentary Notícias de uma Guerra Particular (News from a Personal War, 57 minutes): no narration, just police, dealers and residents speaking to camera. One of the interviewees was Paulo Lins — the man who later wrote the novel.

In 2001 Fernando Meirelles asked Lund to co-direct the short Golden Gate (Palace II), about two small boys in a favela. The two then made City of God together. The documentary was later included on the City of God DVD — it is the film's real first draft.

Casting: one professional actor in the entire film

The film adapts Paulo Lins's 1997 novel of the same name, scripted by Bráulio Mantovani. Lins grew up in Cidade de Deus; the novel is semi-autobiographical and its characters loosely correspond to real people and events.

Meirelles decided against stars. His reason was blunt: at the time Brazil had only three or four young Black professional actors, and middle-class actors could not produce what the film needed. He wanted authenticity.

So from around 2000 the production ran an actors' workshop, selecting roughly a hundred children and young people from the favelas and training them for months. The method was not acting class but the simulation of real street conflict — robberies, brawls, shootings — relying heavily on improvisation. Most leads had never acted, and came from real communities including Vidigal and Cidade de Deus itself. The only professional actor in the film is Matheus Nachtergaele, playing the supporting role of Carrot.

There was an aftermath: Lund and the production set up Nós do Cinema ("We of Cinema"), which began with the young cast of this film and offers film courses and work to children from the favelas. The production also set up a support team to help the actors build lives after the shoot.

Camera and editing: the film's real signature

César Charlone shot it on 16mm. Because the real Cidade de Deus was in the middle of armed conflict, most of the film was shot in Cidade Alta, another Rio favela; the location would not allow the production to bring its own security, so local guards were hired.

Daniel Rezende edited. His cutting is the film's most recognisable feature: the timeline is shattered, the same event re-enters from different years, the image is driven forward by a flood of short takes and jump cuts, and the narration and music almost never stop. The style was imitated for years, and Rezende won a BAFTA for it.

Four Oscar nominations, and an argument

The film premiered at Cannes on 18 May 2002, but out of competition — because executive producer Walter Salles was on that year's jury, which barred it from the official selection. It opened in Brazil on 30 August 2002 and in the United States on 17 January 2003.

At the 76th Academy Awards in 2004 it received four nominations: Best Director (Fernando Meirelles), Best Adapted Screenplay (Bráulio Mantovani), Best Cinematography (César Charlone) and Best Film Editing (Daniel Rezende). It won none. The argument concerns the directing nomination: co-director Kátia Lund was not nominated, though the casting, the on-location work and the understanding of the community's internal relationships were largely hers. The point has been debated in Brazil ever since.

Brazil submitted it for Best Foreign Language Film at the 75th Academy Awards; it was not selected as a finalist.

Reception, and a hard criticism

The budget was about $3.3 million and the worldwide gross about $30.6 million; it was the most-watched Brazilian film of 2002. Roger Ebert gave it four stars; Robert Altman called it the best picture he had ever seen. Rotten Tomatoes records 91% and Metacritic 79.

It is not uncontested. The Brazilian critic Ivana Bentes argued that the film domesticated Brazil's most radical subject matter into an export product, and said it "promotes tourism in hell" — that it turns favela violence into spectacle for outside consumption. That criticism is worth carrying in: watch how the film pursues authenticity through non-professional actors, and ask at the same time who it is showing these people's lives to.

On lists: Paste ranked it first among the 50 best films of the 2000s; the BBC's 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century placed it 38th; the New York Times' "100 Best Movies of the 21st Century" (June 2025) placed it 15th; Abraccine's 2015 poll of the 100 greatest Brazilian films placed it 8th.