Cities of Lost Children:
Depictions of Street Life in Brazilian Cinema
From the romanticized visions of Dickens’ Oliver Twist and David Copperfield to
the sentimentality of Annie’s “hard knock life” and Mickey Rooney’s Whitey Marsh in
Boys Town, popular imagination has historically simplified its portrayal of abandoned
children. Casting them as plucky orphans or victimized runaways, their status may not be
envied nor their problems ever glorified, but artists seem to ignore the complexities of the
underlying social problems in favor of a heroic narrative. In recent decades, however,
filmmakers from around the world have begun to reexamine the plight of lost children
through documentaries and features that seek to not only explore the struggles of
individual children but also the subculture they inhabit and the environmental, economic,
and political forces responsible for the situation. Critics often point to Luis Bunuel’s Los
Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones) as a landmark film that treated juvenile street gangs
realistically and honestly, even if it horrified viewers. More recently, Edet Belzberg’s
disturbing 2001 documentary Children Underground opened the world to the lives of
Romanian children, selling themselves to strangers and getting high on paint. Perhaps it
is not surprising that Brazil, a country in a severe crisis with tens of millions of street
children, has turned the subject of abandoned children into a national theme. Filmmakers
like Hector Babenco, Walter Salles, and most recently, Fernando Meirelles have created
films that, in dealing with street children and their fight for survival, show Brazil
grappling with its own future. A nation with so many lonely, lost, and increasingly
violent boys is a country facing its own lost potential, its own broken promises, and its
own abandonment.
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Brazilians have long celebrated their home as the land of tomorrow, a country
whose future and potential shine brighter than anywhere else. Indeed, its resources—both
in raw materials and in technological advancement—and its people, 160 million and
growing, make it seem that Brazil is poised to be a leader among nations. The largest
country in South America (and the fifth largest in the world) with a population that makes
up a third of Latin America, Brazil has often offered up a romantic image of itself. For
many people in America and Europe, the images of Marcel Camus’ 1959 film Orfeu
Negro (Black Orpheus) defined the country: stunning mountain views overlooking the
sandy beaches of Copacabana, girls from Ipanema, the rhythmic sounds of samba, the
wild and exotic energy of Carnivale. Sadly, however, the great promise Brazil has made
to its citizens has never been truly realized, its potential never reached. Some, in fact
many, Brazilians still hold on to the hope of tomorrow, the Brazil of the future, but many
more are defeated by poverty, violence, and hopelessness.
In contrast to Camus’ images of sunny beaches and riotous dancing, a recent
report assessed a harsher reality: “About 50 million Brazilians are poor, 32 million do not
have access to clean water and 24 million are illiterate” (Martins 1). Modern Brazil is in
fact a land of contradictions, a land of two disparate realities. Its geography is vast and
wide, yet the population is densely packed along the coast. Its history suggests that it is a
rural nation; yet its national identity is nearly synonymous with its two great cities, Rio
de Janeiro and Sao Paolo. Gleaming white hotels line the beaches of Rio and tower over
the nearby favelas, the shantytowns that are overrun with crime and violence.
Cosmopolitan Sao Paolo, a bustling city of 17 million inhabitants, boasts some of the
finest museums, restaurants, and cultural attractions in South America; it also has one of
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the highest crime rates of anywhere in the world. “In 1997, 8,092 people were murdered
in the city of Sao Paulo alone - an average of one person almost every hour”(Martins 1).
It is these two cities, and the social problems that plague them, that truly shape Brazil. It
is this Brazil that concerns modern filmmakers. The promises of a better tomorrow have
been replaced with problems of today. For modern filmmakers, true tragedy lies not in
the ill-fated lovers of Greek mythology, but in the children of modern Brazilian cities.
Director Hector Babenco was one of the leading filmmakers seeking social justice
through his art. In his 1981 film Pixote, the director combines social realism with almost
documentary techniques to not only tell a gripping narrative, but to condemn and criticize
the societal forces that motivate the actions of his characters. Pixote, ostensibly, is the
story of a juvenile delinquent sent to a detention center, where instead of being reformed,
the young boy joins a gang of older, more experienced kids who escape into the streets of
Sao Paolo. While the film can be immediately appreciated simply on its narrative
terms—critics liken it to the Hollywood prison genre, a gang film, or a story of the wild
child in the big city—Babenco demands that the audience never dismiss his plot as fiction
or his characters as invention. Nothing is exaggerated, nothing is dramatic, nothing is
theatrical or artistic. Every element in the film is designed to establish Pixote as a real
boy and his circumstances are real trauma. To this effect, the film opens rather
unconventionally with Babenco himself on screen making a direct address to the viewer:
This is a district of Sao Paolo, a large Latin American industrial city, responsible
for 60-70% of the country’s gross national product. Brazil has 120 million
inhabitants, of which, 50% are under 21 years of age. Of these, 28 million live in
conditions below the standards set forth in the International Children’s Rights
prescribed by the UN. There are also approximately 3 million homeless children
who have no one and no defined family of origin. The situation is more chaotic
when one is aware that they can’t be prosecuted [because Brazilian law prevents
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anyone under the age of 18 to be charged for criminal offences], which permits
the exploitation of these minors by some adults.
He continues to walk in front of a background of corrugated tin houses, offering facts and
statistics. As a filmmaker he seems more politician than artist. While one could dismiss
Babenco’s opening as dry polemic, he is clearly identifying his agenda: Pixote’s story is
not meant to please the audience as mere entertainment; rather, it is an angry call for
action. As Marc Lauria notes, the film’s opening “is used as a foregrounding of events to
come, a merging of the real and fictional, so while we are witnessing events in the
fictional story, we must, in fact, take them for truth” (Lauria 1). To further blur the
distinction between real life and filmic creation, Babenco discloses an interesting fact
about his lead actor: “Fernando [Ramos da Silva], who plays the main character of
Pixote, lives with his mom and nine other siblings in this house. The film is acted by
children who belong to this social class.” There is something frighteningly prophetic1 in
Babenco’s decision to cast real people, denizens of the favelas, over professional actors
and “then [shoot] on the locations where they lived and worked…Incidents in Pixote
don’t seem to be set up for the cameras; the film seems to follow the characters no matter
what they do or say” (Lauria 2). The film is infused with a discomforting authenticity. If
the Sao Paolo on screen is not some staged city from a studio back lot, and the people
who populate the film are not actors, the events, while fictitious, seem not only possible
but very real and extremely close.
As he identifies in his opening remarks, Babenco is concerned about the how the
legal situation compounds the problem. As noted earlier, Babenco complains that “The
The tragedy of Pixote is mirrored in real life fate of the actor who played him. “In reality da Silva was
actually killed by police bullets in 1988, when he was 19” (Lauria 2). This incident also sparked the 1996
film Quem Matou Pixote? (Who Killed Pixote?).
1
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situation is more chaotic when one is aware that they can’t be prosecuted,” a statement
that belies the complexity of the problem. Pixote is introduced properly as a character
when he is rounded up by the authorities who suspect a street kid of committing murder.
The investigation and interrogation is a muddled mess; the kids, alone and distrusting, are
at the mercy of the system. “Society demands the appearance of justice and revenge, and
so the murder will be pinned on one of them—never mind if it’s the right one or
not…solving the crime is not the point” (Ebert 1). The remainder of the first half of the
film is set in a brutal reformatory. At this point, it is important to note that Pixote was
released during the last years of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for
twenty years, 1964-1984. These years were “an era of authoritarianism, [noted for] the
suppression of constitutional rights, police persecution, imprisonment and
torture”(Didaco 1). Implicit in the opening half of the film is a criticism of Brazil’s
correctional system. Not only are institution’s officials corrupt, but the conditions in
which the boys are kept are inhumane. Babenco offers an unflinching account of abuse,
from a scarring rape scene to brutal beating of an inmate at the hands of his guards.
Babenco keeps his focus on the victimized children, but he also offers a glimpse
of what awaits these children once they turn eighteen and are herded off to adult jail. The
boys who are suspected of the initial crime are pulled out of the reformatory and paraded
in front witnesses. When the victim’s family can’t make a positive identification, the
boys are taken through an adult prison. From behind the bars in the darkly lit, dungeonlike space, the men jeer, cat call, and grab at the boys. There is no real exchange other
than shouts and grunts, until one prisoner, a large baldheaded mustachioed man asks
Pixote his name. “Pixote,” he says menacingly, “I like it.” The scene then abruptly ends.
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It is Babenco’s jarring cut that underscores the tension of the scene. The prison system
has long been a problem in Brazilian society, and it is one that still haunts the nation. In
the years since Pixote, the problem has only gotten worse. In 1992, one hundred and
eleven inmates died after the police stormed into Sao Paulo’s Carandiru prison; ten years
later, in Embu das Artes jail also in Sao Paulo, ten people were killed while sixty others
escaped in a riot; in April 2004, fourteen inmates were killed and others were severally
mutilated in a riot at Urso Branco prison in Rondonia (Branford 1). Overcrowding is rife.
Cells built for four people now house twenty-five. Sanitation is abysmal and disease is
rampant. According to most recent findings, “Amnesty International estimates that a
system with a capacity for 180,000 inmates is now holding at least 285,000” (Branford
1). Babenco himself would return to the dehumanizing effects of the Brazilian penal
system in his 2003 film Carandiru, which details the October 1992 massacre.
When the boys are returned to the reformatory, after being locked naked in
solitary confinement, it becomes clear that they did not all return together. Two boys
were shot, executed by the police, and a third, Fumaca, was beaten nearly to death.
Fumaca, one of the few charismatic teens in the detention center, had become a friend
and protector of young Pixote. His sudden and unexplained absence leaves Pixote on his
own again. While Pixote knows that his friend did not return with him, his mind seems
unable to process what has happened. In an environment where adults continually betray
those entrusted to their care, where the vulnerable are raped and beaten by predatory
peers, children learn to suppress any kind of weakness and suspect any display of
emotion. In a scene that is both poignant and upsetting, Pixote, collapsed on a bathroom
floor with a tattered cast on one foot, dirt on his face, and a filthy toilet beside him, takes
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several deep huffs of glue before laughing manically. It is certainly easier to laugh than to
cry; it is safer to get high than to show fear; it is better to repress reality than face it
directly. If it is possible to think that Pixote entered into the state’s custody as an eleven
year-old with some traces of childhood and innocence left in him, by the time Fumaca’s
dead body is found littered in a dump, Pioxte has been brutalized and hardened and aged.
Babenco ends the first half of his film with a clear condemnation of state
institutions. The adults—whether it is the boys’ custodian Sapato, the police officer
Almir, or the governmental Director—are solely preoccupied with their own self-interest.
The police are more concerned with doling out punishment than they are in serving
justice; the administrators are worried about journalists’ published opinions over the
health of their charges; in all, the well being of the children is ancillary. In order to spare
themselves of public scrutiny over Fumaca’s death, the authorities frame one of the kids
for the crime and then proceed to beat him to death when he refuses to take the fall. In
the resulting chaos—the boys burn their mattresses and openly rebel against the system—
the Director asks the boys why they would act so destructively against this place, “your
home,” he calls it, and against him, “your father.” The answer by this point is obvious to
everyone but him. With a note of triumph, Pixote leads several other boys to the window
in the infirmary. Shouting, “Freedom is outside!” Pixote charges out of the dormitory
onto the roof and back into the city. Somewhat ominously, one boy chooses to stay
behind, saying, “It’s worse out there for me.” It is a warning that seems to hang in the air.
The second half of the film, set in the streets of Sao Paolo and Rio, seeks to
reconcile those last words. Free from the repression of the reformatory, the boys have
not escaped neglect, loneliness, violence, or exploitation. Still, after the stifling
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confinement of the reformatory, the streets of Sao Paolo pulsate with light, energy, and
possibility. Even more importantly, Pixote is not alone; in fact, he seems to be part of a
real community as he is joined by his friends Chico, the transvestite Lilica, and the
unofficial leader, Dito. Together, the gang survives through pick-pocketing and purse
snatching. Soon, we are reminded of Babenco’s initial warning again: because children
cannot be prosecuted from crimes, they are often exploited by adults. Lilica, the
feminine member of the gang, introduces Pixote and his friends to Cristal, a drug dealing
pimp, who brings the kids into his world of hard drugs and pornography. In a society
with few prospects, it is only a matter of time before street children become street
criminals. Pixote and his gang, carrying a load of cocaine, make the trip to Rio, a city that
embodies all the vices and virtues of Brazilian life.
With no other ambitions, the boys begin to fantasize about a life of crime and
reveal not just a desire for material things, but for respect and safety. Perched above the
sun-kissed beaches of Rio as they wait for the money from their drug deal, the boys
demonstrate something they haven’t felt previously: hope. Lilica describes some richly
embroidered clothes in a shop window. Pixote and Chico, however, have different
aspirations. “When I get my share,” Pixote tells the others, “no one will mess with me. I
won’t die like Big Boy.” It is a telling line; Pixote has projected all his needs onto this
drug deal. In his childlike mind, and here we are reminded of his developmental age—he
believes he has found away to not only gain power, but to escape death. Chico, who has
always remained in the background as a kind of tag-along, suddenly becomes quite
animated as he describes a more elaborate articulation of Pixote’s dream:
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When I get my share of the take…I’m gonna buy a new black .38 and you know
what I’ll do? This is a hold-up! Get’em up, you bastard! That how I’ll treat those
ass kickers. Everyone will respect me. Chico the Trigger King!
Both the boys see the drug deal as more than just a criminal enterprise. It is the key to
future success, power, respect, and revenge. When you’ve got nothing to lose, there is no
downside, no risk, no danger. There are certainly no feelings of guilt or apprehension.
When you’ve been on your own since childhood, when you’ve been sent away to a
reformatory even when you’re innocent, when you’ve seen friends raped, beaten, and
killed, survival creates its own law. Selling drugs is not a moral question, neither is
robbery, or for that matter, murder.
In that moment, the boys seem to reconcile themselves to the prospect of career
criminality. Although they are still very much children—underscored by Pixote’s naïve
comment that he can escape death—the boys become masters at playacting adult criminal
roles. When Deborah, their drug contact, gives them the run-around one two many times,
Chico and Pixote stand strong, as the gangster toughs they aspire to be. Unfortunately,
real life rarely lives up to the grandiose fantasies of children. Chico, having doomed
himself with the name Trigger King, dies clumsily as Deborah resists. Pixote, without
thinking stabs her, killing her. The audience may see that Pixote doesn’t fully grasp the
consequences of his actions (and the permanence of death), but he has become so skilled
at imitating the swagger of the older boys around him, that his actions appear natural.
Whether he is going through purses, smoking drugs, stabbing Deborah, or using a gun,
Pixote is an apt pupil who is so emotionally detached from his crimes that he can perform
them without compunction.
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With Chico dead, the group quickly finds a replacement, an older, world-weary
prostitute named Sueli. Sueli, as an adult and a woman, offers the narrative an interesting
character. Abandoned by her boyfriend and pawned off to Dito, Lilica, and Pixote as if
she were chattel, Sueli is another discarded character, lost and longing and sad. She too
is a criminal; not only is she a prostitute, but she helps Pixote and Dito rob the men she
brings back to her apartment. She is of them, but not them; because of her age and her
gender, she reminds the boys not of themselves, but of all that they lack and all that they
long to have. For Dito, she is the lover, a reminder of natural adult sexuality; for
transvestite Lilica, she is the female rival, a reminder of his own inadequacies; for young
Pixote, she is the mother he never had. In reality, she is none of these; in fact, she is
nothing more than a cold Carioca whore who can smoke a cigarette impassively on a
toilet next to her aborted fetus. Still, the power of the boys’ desire overwhelms reality.
Lilica runs away like a jilted lover; Dito falls into Sueli’s arms, but is killed when one of
their robberies goes wrong.
As for Pixote, his desire for a mother figure propels the film to its final, tragic
ending. After Dito’s accidental death, Pixote needs reassurance and protection. Sueli,
too, feels alone and the two suddenly share the idea that they could start again and form a
new family together. “All of my family is from Minas,” she tells him, “We could go
there. Come with me? Don’t go away. I can’t be all alone.” It seems as if happiness and
stability, which has eluded these characters for so long, is suddenly within reach. Pixote,
perhaps reacting to his hand in the murder of an American businessman and Dito’s
accidental death, suddenly vomits. Sueli is not repulsed or off put by Pixote’s sudden
sickness; instead, she shows uncharacteristic care and concern and welcomes Pixote, like
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a child, into her lap. Folded up in her arms, Pixote rocks like an infant while Sueli
soothes his worries, saying, “Calm down. Everything’s okay. Sueli’s here. It’s all over
now.” Then, she offers Pixote her breast and he begins to suckle. “Mommy’s with you,”
she whispers. It is one the most uncomfortable scenes in a film that is always offering
disquieting images. Yes, as noted film critic Roger Ebert points out, “Pixote turns to her
breast, not in a sexual way, but in need, and we see the child who has always hungered
for a mother he never had,” but there is something Oedipal about an eleven year-old boy
nursing from a prostitute (2). Here is a child seeking sustenance, love, and family, and
while he may feel like he’s found it, we know that it is a mirage, a heart-breaking
chimera. Sadly, Sueli discovers this before Pixote does. Perhaps the only thing worse
than providing a false dream is to offer a dream and then rip it out of someone’s hands.
Cruelly and selfishly, Seuli decides, “I don’t want this. Get your dirty mouth off me.”
She kicks Pixote out of her bedroom, out of her home, out of her life. We last see him
loading his gun before walking, alone, down a set of train tracks. Ultimately, this is a
film of rejection, alienation, and desperation. If we are reminded of Babenco’s opening
salvo, then we recall that there are “3 million homeless children who have no one and no
defined family of origin.” Sueli’s rejection of Pixote is happening all the time, all over
Brazil. Brazil, like Sueli, is aborting its babies and abandoning its children. There is a
generation of young people told they are not wanted and forced to fend for themselves.
Babenco’s last visual image, of Pixote taking his gun before walking through the city, is a
warning. A society that throws away its children is bound to face consequences.
While the character of Pixote disappears down that stretch of track, the violent
consequences of neglected children becomes the focus of Fernando Meirelles’ 2003 film
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City of God or Ciudade de Deus. Filmed a generation after Pixote, City of God is epic in
scope. Spanning close to twenty-five years of history, from the late 1960’s to the 1980’s,
it is the story of a neighborhood, the titular City of God, a “slum wasteland, 6km from
downtown Rio, [that] was created in the early 1960’s for the most cynical reason
imaginable: to isolate the poor and remove them from view” (Macnab 1). Like Babenco
who used real kids to play the parts in his film, Meirelles and his co-director Katia Lund
worked with kids from inside the fovela. But while Pixote had a documentary-like feel to
it, City of God is a hyper-stylized film that rushes headlong into the action with a kinetic
frenzy. Geoffrey Macnab describes the film as “flashy and exuberant, shot with handheld
cameras…as brash and entertaining as any Hollywood gangster movie” perhaps because
the filmmaker sought to present it like “a cocaine trip, very quick, a lot of information”
(1). While the narrative is a long, sweeping arc that features 110 speaking parts, two
distinctly different characters emerge as the anchors (Verniere 2). Rocket, the film’s
narrator and protagonist, is a level headed kid who has dreams of escaping the violence
and the self-destructiveness of the favela while his friend Lil Dice dreams of power and
respect anyway he can get it. It is through these two characters, and their divergent paths,
that Marielles is able to trace the history of this neighborhood and the history of modern
urban Brazil.
Like Pixote’s friend Chico who dreamed of getting a gun as a means of securing
respect, Lil Dice tells the older kids, “I’m a gangster too.” Lil Duce, along with his close
friend Benny, follow a group of older teens known as the Tender Trio, hoping to join
them in their heists of delivery trucks. Compared to the gang in Pixote, the members of
the Tender Trio are small time hoods. They are kids whose lives still have a bit of joy in
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it, even if they are delinquents. They all have families, homes, love interests. They play
soccer and help their fathers with work. Rocket, whose brother Goose was a member of
the Trio, remarks, “I used to think that the Tender Trio were the most dangerous hoods in
Rio. But they were just amateurs.” Lil Dice, the young follower, isn’t content to be just
an amateur. Although he himself is probably only eleven, not much older Pixote, he has
more criminal ambition than most of the older boys. He dreams up a plan to hold up a
lover’s motel, a quick in-and-out job that guaranteed high payoff with little risk. The
Trio run in, leaving Dice outside on watch. What seemed like a smoothly run operation
ends disastrously. The police are onto them and somehow the hotel is riddled with dead
bodies. In an interesting narrative technique, the film moves on to the next chapter, the
1970’s, before offering a flashback to fill in the details. Lil Dice, who has renamed
himself Lil Ze, has become the most feared, most respected, most unpredictable gangster
in the City of God and it all started that night of the motel robbery. Stuck outside on
lookout duty, Dice grumbled, “They are having fun and not me.” Armed with his gun,
Dice walked calmly into the hotel and coldly murdered everyone inside. Marielles shows
the passing of time through a montage of quickly cut shots, each of them in succession
showing Dice reinventing himself as the gangster Ze. Each shot looks up at a firing
barrel of gun with Ze laughingly pulling the trigger. Ze’s perverse pleasure in murder is
far more than anything we see in Pixote. If Pixote and his gang are perpetrators of crime,
they are also victims; Ze is nobody’s victim. In fact, it is determination to never be
victimized that propels his sociopathic bloodlust.
As Rocket resumes his narrative, Ze is celebrating his eighteenth birthday and is
planning his next phase in satisfying his overleaping ambition: conquering the city’s drug
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trade. Surrounded by the raucous favela nightlife—color, music, women, and dancing
that rival Camus’ Orfeus Negro—the camera whirls round and round in circles and tight
zooms. The screen fills not with Ze, but with the images that Ze sees, and by nature
covets as he tells Benny:
Who are the fattest cats here? There are tons of them. Look at Jerry Adriani—
gold chain, snazzy clothes. Look at Pereira and the chick he’s with…Check out
his car. Then there’s Blacky, covered in gold. Gold chain, gold watch. Look at
Carrot, and his car. They’re all dealers. They’re all f---ing loaded. Hold-ups
bring in chicken s--t. The big bucks are in drugs. Especially selling coke…We’ll
kill these clowns and take over their business.
In a few short months, Ze succeeds. Ze has risen to such heights of power because he is a
master organizer. Employing savvy business skills, Ze creates institutionalized drug
dealing. Kids come in as delivery boys work themselves up to lookouts, then to “vapors”
or dealers, then to soldiers, and finally to manager. His gang has provided a social
structure and doles out privilege, justice, employment, and opportunity. It rewards
loyalty and punishes challengers. It offers money, escape, and, like all gangs, a place for
people to fit in. It is as if Ze’s City of God is a city of Pixotes grown up. If he had
continued walking down those railroad tracks until he came to favela, he would have
found a place for himself. The search for lost mothers will always end in disappointment;
the search for power through crime, though it will end in death, at least seems to offer a
little something before coming to collect.
While it would be easy to condemn Ze and the brutal tactics he uses—and they
should be condemned as they are bone chillingly horrifying—the film doesn’t attempt
any moral grandstanding. Ze is a loathsome figure, but he is respected by many in the
community. Rocket, who is fearful and distrusting of Ze, acknowledges the support the
gang has from the slum. “No one robs or rapes,” Rocket tells us, and if selling drugs
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were legal, Ze would be “Man of the Year.” The problem is that the residents of the slum
mistake efficiency with goodness, confuse fear with true respect, and accept results
without examining the means. One of Ze’s biggest accomplishments, in the eyes of the
favela, is how he handles the Runts. The Runts are a rag tag collection of vagrant kids,
some as young as six, who have an eerie resemblance to young Pixote. Rocket
disapproves of them ever since his first run-on with them when they interrupted a
romantic moment. A second time, they cost him his job at a supermarket. Rocket
narrates: “The Runts were kids who didn’t respect the law of the slum. They would mug
residents, hold up bakeries.” While the Runts inspire little sympathy, no one can be
prepared for how Ze handles the problem. Running after a few of the boys in the streets,
he catches two of them and shoots them in their feet. He then drafts a loyal kid out of his
ranks named Steak ‘n’ Fries to shoot one of them. In one of the film’s most unforgettable
moments, Steak ‘n’ Fries stares, shakily, at the two boys, both bent over holding their
bleeding sneakers. One boy, a small child no more than seven or eight, cries in real pain.
A tense minute passes before Steak ‘n’ Fries makes his choice and pulls the trigger. This
is the damning cycle of Brazilian life: as one street child is killed, another becomes a
killer. Two lives are irrevocably lost and the numbers are only growing. If Pixote
warned about the terrible traps left out for children—neglectful families, poor social
services, a corrupt and indifferent legal system, brutal and dehumanizing reform
institutions—then City of God shows us what happens when those children grow up. The
emotional holes in Pixote’s life are still there, they just get filled with more dangers. The
weapons are more deadly, the drugs harder, the choices riskier, the consequences more
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lasting. Both movies ask the same thing: did you know this was happening? Now that
you do, you can no longer claim ignorance.
Earlier this year—March 31—in an industrial suburb of Rio de Janeiro known as
Nova Iguacu, a car drove by a small neighborhood bar and opened fire on the street
corner. In a few seconds, fifteen people, mostly teenagers, were killed. The police were
still identifying the bodies when the next call came in. The same gunmen had traveled a
few miles northwest to the neighborhood of Queimados and repeated the slaughter. In
one night, thirty people, including children, were massacred. Even in a city like Rio,
where violent murders have grown from commonplace to epidemic, the news was
shocking. Drug lords have been waging bloody turf wars in the poor shantytowns for
decades, but this time, however, the suspects are not the cocaine kingpins; the suspects
are police officers. Sadly, this is not the first time that the police have been implicated in
a crime only fitting for hardened gangsters. In 1993, the police were responsible for a
bloody street massacre where twenty-one people were killed. This is the world of urban
Cariocas and Paulistas, as the respective citizens of Rio and Sao Paolo are known, and
this is the world that is treated in Brazilian art. Modern filmmakers, in particular, seem to
be struck by the all the struggles of the city—class, race, crime. In many ways, the
cities of Rio and Sao Paolo move beyond mere liminal space; the cities themselves
actually exert a force that directs the action. The segregation of the city--the division of
class, wealth, and safety--becomes more than just geography; it becomes an agent that
both propels and stifles action. The influence of drug culture, criminal gangs, and the
depiction of impoverished children are at the forefront of contemporary Brazilian cinema
in forms that mark it as distinctively Brazilian. It has been nearly twenty-five years since
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Pixote, gun in hand, walked out into the city alone. Sadly, he is alone with millions like
him.