Back to the City

DQ visits the set of the eagerly awaited City of God: The Fight Rages On, the Max series that returns to the Brazilian favelas to tell the story of what happened to the original film’s characters 20 years later.

City of God, the most watched Latin American production in history, is coming back. But true to the times, the Brazilian film that established a new screen genre in 2002 – the favela movie – returns as a series that continues the narrative thread 20 years after the original story.

And it does so again through the studio behind the movie, O2 Filmes (in coproduction with Warner Bros Discovery Latin America), which has produced six episodes that will premiere globally  on streamer Max on August 25. The show will also be available on HBO Latino.

The plot unfolds in the early 2000s when the release of a young drug dealer from prison puts the Cidade de Deus (City of God) neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro back into dispute. Residents find themselves trapped between drug traffickers, militias and public authorities, but the need to escape this cycle makes the community unite to face their oppressors.

“The film told the context of the favela from the point of view of the militia, drug trafficking, police and corruption. The series is totally different: it tells the story of the people who are suffering because of all that violence,” Alexandre Rodrigues, the star of the original film who returns to star in the series, tells DQ from the set.

“City of God opened up to the world a truth that is not the whole truth, however. That’s why I see the series as a complement to that story,” he adds.

In the Jardim Iporanga favela in São Paulo – the city doubles for Rio in the series – the football pitch has been transformed into the dining space for the cast and crew working on the series,  95% of which was filmed on real locations. The streets of the neighbourhood are also full of people, both those hired by O2 for the production and mothers with their children, dogs, and neighbours who come and go with the day’s shopping. This is the dynamic on the set of the series based on the most watched Latin American film in history.

Such is the film’s legacy that, after its release in 2002, it caused a tremendous global impact and catapulted the careers of everyone involved in its production, particularly co-directors Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, and Uruguayan cinematographer César Charlone.

“So much so that the film Slumdog Millionaire was inspired by City of God,” says Rodrigues, who reprises the role of Buscapé, now a hardened adult who goes by his real name, Wilson.

Perhaps the serenity that Rodrigues conveys in his eyes was one of the traits that led him to such a successful role – one which, in his words, was the first job of his life.

Another of City of God’s innovations back at the turn of the century was the inclusion of non-professional actors in leading roles. In the case of the series, perhaps the gamble is less risky: to bring back familiar faces from the original production and complement them with other talent, some more established, such as Andreia Horta (Alice, Império, Liberdade Liberdade), and others emerging, such as co-star Eli Ferreira (Órfãos da Terra), also a native of the Rio suburb of Nova Iguaçu, like Rodrigues.

“The aesthetics of the film were more of the Latin American cinema of the 2000s combined with elements of US cinema from the 70s and 80s,” director Aly Muritiba (Cangaço Novo, Deserto Particular) explains. “Now the series uses more references to African cinema: more colourful, not so much hand-held camera, more steady. We use drones and we have more control than we had in the film.”

The episodes of the new series also add up to a total running time of six hours, filled with “the urgency of the real”, favela funk music, the intimacy of black neighbourhood activists and a complex political universe approached from a human perspective.

“It has more depth than the film, but keeps the same pace,” says executive producer Wellington Pingo. “Some of the scenes from the film return to the series through flashbacks, and we’ll even have unreleased scenes from 2002 that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film.”

tagged in: City of God, City of God: The Fight Rages On, HBO Latino, Max, O2 Filmes, Warner Bros Discovery Latin America