City of God impacted me greatly not only because it portrayed the vicious, never-ending cycle of gang violence in Brazil, but also because of how it portrayed the gang leaders as humans. These grown men showed the exact characteristics of small, petty children, on a larger scale: when Li’l Ze is turned down by a girl, he throws a childish tantrum–in the form of holding the girl’s boyfriend at gunpoint and making him strip. This analogy is made prominent by the filmmakers during the last scene, when Li’l Ze is dead, and the focus is on the “Runts,” who are only elementary-school age, making plans for who to kill next.

This reminded me of a major theme of Lord of the Flies, a novel in which a group of school-age boys becomes stranded on an island. Without the laws of society, the boys quickly turn savage. Indeed, we as human beings are only as “human” as the laws that guide us and the morals that tie us to other humans.

City of God depicts the extreme violence that is present in the favela and how it ubiquitously affects the lives of those in it. I was first introduced to the prevalence of the corruption and violence in Brazil while learning about the topic in high school. However, learning about it through a presentation is very different than seeing the visual aspects and internalizing the effects of continuously seeing dead bodies. The horrors of watching senseless violence become regular and as a result of incomprehensibly minute reasons becomes even worse as we see children cause this themselves. Further, the film depicts how often, the only way of surviving seems to be to participate in the corruption and violence themselves.

While this film was striking and seemed to create a sense of hopelessness, it is not surprising. There are large disparities between cities — a city can be teeming with extravagance while a neighboring city encounters death, corruption, and violence at extreme levels. It becomes more important to realize that these disparities exist so that cities do not become ignored and situations cyclically worsening.

The movie City of God pictures a slum called City of God in Brazil that is continuously affected by gangs that are in control of drugs and guns. At the beginning of the movie three of the people this gang seem to have good control of the slum. They loot and rob local businesses and share some of it with the members of the city in return of protection. One time they decide to rob a motel and tell one of the younger members Li’l Dice to serve as the lookout for the police. Instead what he does is that he shots everyone in the motel. This takes the police’s attention a lot and that’s when things start to get worse in the city of god. People tell the police that no one knows anything and a lot of innocent people become arrested and killed because of this incident.

Throughout the movie there are many instances in which children and very young people get involved with drugs and guns. At some point in the movie the neighborhood seems to have relative peace with the existence of one gang. It looks like both the nature of drugs and the presence of the police are making this whole community fall apart. One of the points that our GRF asked us to think about was that if it was better for that whole community to be under the control of one gang or for the police to try get control over the whole neighborhood. This question’s a hard one for me to answer. At first place, I would probably say for the police to take over. However, the police in this movie were so corrupt that they were making the matter much worse. Overall, I don’t think in long term for the gang to take control over the area would result in peace cause the gang was kind of destroying itself from inside.

The reason I thought this whole community was falling apart was because fear and the distrust between the people and the government. The fact that everyone is trying to hide everything they know because of the fear of a corrupt government was both making it worse for the people and the government. Closer to the end of the movie, the brother of one of the old gang Rocket members gets an internship with the newspaper because he takes a picture of the head of the gang Li’l Dice in the City of God where no one even dares to go. Rocket after getting the internship even secretly takes pictures of the police stealing Li’l Dice’s money and letting him go and Li’l Dice being killed. He eventually decides not to publish the picture of the police. Even when Rocket’s in a position that can reveal information decides not to; this is the whole reason everyone is suffering no one knows anything and everything has to remain a secret.