City of God is a brilliant production by a team of Brazillian filmakers and writers that combine to tell the saga of a whole nation. And it is an important one at that. The urban legends surrounding crime and violence in Brazil's cities has been slowly leaking into the western press for years. And most who pay some attention to the news have some idea about crime in the streets of Brazil. But this film really puts a face on the cliche and tells the story in a way the media never could.

City of God is also a very slick, professional production. Years ahead of many of Latin American films in this respect. The sets used for the early chilhood scenes set in Rio's slums at the end of the 60s are artistic reproductions on a near hollywood scale, that poignantly re-create the empty urban wasteland of the projects around the time of their creation. The camera work and editing is brilliant, adding all the slick effects of an american film, as well as an artistic angle you might expect more from european cinema. And the story is presented thru a group of characters who grow up in the projects, and are introduced to the audience with cool titles and short episodes that bounce back and forth thru their lives and the early years of Rio's ghetto like a Torrentino film or a hip new english gangster flick. Again, not what you would expect from an artistic Latin American film.

This film is almost as entertaining as it is important, tho it is equally intense, and necessarily violent. The almost constant flow of violence is not, however, particularly graphic--offensive more in thought than in vision, but that is the whole point of the story: its kids killing kids in a way no american ghetto could really imagine. At the same time the filmakers give the movie a very human touch and keep it entertaining by weaving in humorous and even romantic episodes thruout.

The film grows with the main characters who all die off one by one as they become increasingly involved in drug trafficking and gang warfare until, in the end, remains only the one characters who chose the camera over the gun and lived to leak his images to the Brazillian Press, where the true story of The City of God was finally told.