For this week’s cultural post, my language partner recommended I watch the movie City of God or known as “Cidade de Deus” in Portuguese, and take a dive into the controversy and cultural elements surrounding the film. The film was released in Brazil in 2002, then worldwide in 2003, and is supposedly set loosely on real events. It takes inspiration from the novel with the same name Cidade de Deus and is set in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. This movie fared well amongst critics and was nominated for four Academy awards, with one of them being Brazil’s entry into the category of best film in a foreign language. It’s clear that this movie is very popular and still gets talked about widely as one of the best movies of the 21st century. I personally can see why as I thought it was outstandingly done and was suspenseful enough to keep the audience engaged throughout. There also were many characters you identified with from the Favela and became immensely intrigued in their stories and decisions throughout.
In order to watch the film, I had to force myself to watch in Portuguese and have English subtitles on. This was pretty confusing at first and I had to rewind multiple times to re-watch various parts of the film. In addition, it’s also a rather long movie running over 2 hours but that’s a side point. With all that said, I was able to work through it and actually took a lot away from a dialogue and interaction perspective. It was intriguing to see normal conversations within the movie and then look to the translations to really try and understand how that relates. In my head I was constantly trying to pick out words I knew and seeing how they connected with the very unfamiliar utterances of the characters (which there were a lot). I was really looking for question phrases I know like: Tudo bem, Até amanhã, Eu estoum bem, and other common phrases. One word I seem to remember from the film is fraude which means fraud. Which just is another word to add to my vocabulary.
As for the actual plot, it deals with the growth in organized crime in the city while the main characters are set on two differing paths with one choosing to take part in drug dealing. The main controversy of the film is that many believe that this film was glorifying poverty and violence within favelas, which in turn reinforces many stereotypes about favelas and lower end living in Brazil. Many critics believe that the film doesn’t accurately portray the rich culture of Favela’s and just focuses more on crime/violence within the film. While I can see this argument, I definitely think it did a good job of portraying cultural aspects of favelas like food, music, and other instances of local life. Another big critique of the film was that it inspired a phenomenon called “favela tourism”. This is increased tourism is seen as not being ethical because in many cases it’s not uplifting the actual people or living conditions, but rather just seen as a way of making money.
The second biggest controversy of the film was while casting actual members of favela’s helped improve the authenticity of the film, they weren’t paid a fair wage for their work. It’s been shown that actors across the board, from main characters to supplemental roles, made anywhere from 5,000 - 10,000 reais when the film itself grossed over 100 million. This is quite sad, and many actors seen in the hit film are today still living in poverty within the same locales. This is definitely a big issue and one I was very surprised to learn about. Often times we assume that life is similar to that portrayed in these cultural films or television worlds, but in reality, it’s often far different.
Overall, this film really immersed me into the Portuguese language and cultural. I learned so much through the film, and in outside research, about Brazilian culture and overall life in the country. Major themes of violence, inequality, and others became a focal point within the film and my research. It was interesting to see how controversial such a hit film was and how that film related to actual life in where it’s set. I definitely learned a lot through this experience linguistically and culturally.
Comments
Cidade de Deus in my opinion is one of the best Brazilian movies ever produced. It really shows the true side of what happens in the Brazilian world of organized crime. Another excellent movie that I highly recommend is Orfeu. It also shows the world of organized crime in addition to the samba culture.