Witness History - City of God: The film that reshaped global cinema

0:00Greg JennerThis BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph and have a laugh while we do it. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye. Hello, I'm Rina Stuntenschama and this is Witness History from the BBC World Service. If you're a regular listener, feel free to skip ahead a little bit. But if you're listening for the very first time, I'd like to tell you a bit about us.

1:05Speaker 4We're the podcast that takes you back to a moment in history by speaking to those who were there and using amazing archive. If that sounds like something you'd listen to, hit subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts and turn your notifications on so you never miss an episode. For today's story, we're going back 25 years behind the scenes of a Brazilian film which would stun audiences with its unflinching honesty and reshape global cinema.

1:33Speaker 4City of God captured the brutal realities of child gangsters trapped in an unforgiving cycle of violence, casting local children whose lives weren't far from the stories on screen. Filming began in 2001 in Rio de Janeiro's favelas or slums. When I was working in the favela day in, day out and I'm reading the newspapers, I was like, there's a disconnect here because the newspapers would describe

2:02Katia Lundthe drug dealers as public enemy number one, and it would create all this fear. But starting to realize that the drug dealers are 11 years old, 13 years old, 18 years old, the head of the Hoffa Vella was like 24 years old, and they're carrying international guns. So the question is, you know, what's going on here? It was a question that Katia learned who co-directed the movie

2:33Speaker 4couldn't stop asking herself. Born in Brazil to American parents, she grew up in Sao Paulo and worked in Rio's favelas in music videos, including Michael Jackson's They Don't Care About Us. Rio is known for its sprawling coast and lush mountains with picture postcard views, but also for its underclass of impoverished families largely forgotten by the rest of society.

3:02Katia Lundthe only branch of government that would go into the favelas with the police. And even the journalists would go with the police and they'd stand behind the police and they'd stay at the bottom of the favela and wait for the police to go up there. You know, there'd be a shootout with the whole conflict and then come down and then they would ask the police what had happened. Katia made a documentary about the conflict between heavily armed drug dealers and the police.

3:28Speaker 4She interviewed the author of City of God, Paolo Lins. His semi-autobiographical novel gave an insider's perspective on the housing project of the same name where Paolo grew up. It would lead to her working with Fernando Mireles, who bought the rights to the book and directed City of God. First they made a short film, then came the feature.

3:52Katia LundKatia wanted to cast children from Rio's favelas, and many had no acting experience at all. Armed with video cameras, young people from an acting school were asked to put the word out that they were looking for kids to take part. They go to the different favelas and say, hey, who wants to do an acting course for film? Which was kind of crazy because there were no black people on TV.

4:14Katia LundBut it was free and they'd have transportation paid for and they'd have snack. And one of the kids that stood out almost immediately was Douglas Silva. Douglas Silva played Little Zay's the younger version. Little Zay is a power hungry sociopath with a menacing laugh who becomes a powerful drug lord. He was about 11 years old.

4:41Katia Lundand he was super skinny and he had a big belly and he had these big eyes that would like pop out of his face and he was coming from an acting school and his mother would spend like two hours on a bus or something to bring him and he was a natural from day one. But I just remember the first day that we were shooting and they had gotten the wrong bus or the bus had been late and when he arrived he was in tears and like he was just devastated that he was late.

5:10Katia Lundand it really impacted me how he had this incredible sense of responsibility and commitment. The children weren't given scripts and instead were asked to improvise different scenarios during the year-long workshops. We would bring up scenes and then they would put it all in their own words. So a lot of their own words we would incorporate into the script and they did that for a year. So like there was a lot of improvisation but

5:40Speaker 4You know, they knew exactly where they were going to shoot. They knew what the scene was. You know, they were very malleable and adaptable. Set over three decades, City of God begins in the 60s, where its main characters are petty child thieves. By the time it ends in the early 80s, it's become a war zone, and most of the protagonists are either dead or part of a bloody drugs war.

6:07Speaker 4It's narrated by Rocket, who dreams of being a photographer. On the day Shaggy died, I remember the crowds and a camera. I'd always wanted to have one, he says. The film focuses on the escalating battle between rival gangs led by Little Ze and Carrot.

6:38Speaker 4It's not an easy watch with its bullet-ridden violence and uses handheld cameras, slow and fast motion, and frenetic, sharp editing. In that brutal scene, a big group of kids scramble as Little Zay approaches, holding a gun. They're quick, those kids, they run fast, he exclaims, cornering two boys before forcing a baby-faced child wearing a t-shirt, several sizes too small.

7:13Katia Lundto choose whether to be shot in the hand or foot. So we ended up shooting that too in the afternoon. The hottest sun scorching and we hadn't eaten and that boy hadn't done it with special effects. There was fake blood inside the tennis shoe that would pop. So he had rehearsed it many times but there he was that day he hadn't eaten since early and there's a very loud noise from the shooting but he channeled all of that into the scene. Despite the film's ferocity the atmosphere behind the camera was a different story. It's such a violent difficult film to watch but We had so much fun because they knew each other already. They'd been rehearsing and playing together. They'd been in the school together. They'd all pile into these vans and they'd go to the set and then have breakfast together and then have lunch together and then hang out together. And then it was really sad when it finished because all of a sudden that whole world disappeared. But that's why we kept the school going. After that year of prep,

8:24Katia Lundnine-week shooting and a year in post-production, the film finally had its world premiere at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in May 2002. It was a huge moment. It didn't make it into the competition, but it totally took over Cannes and it was in every paper and it was huge. We also took four or five of the actors with us to Cannes and it was it was an amazing time.

8:52Katia LundCity of God caught fire around the world and was nominated for four Oscars. But at the time, it wasn't life-changing for the young cast whose powerful performances wowed audiences. After City of God, we continued with that short film Golden Gate. It became a TV series for about four years. It only had like four or five episodes per year. But other than that, there was no work for them. So they had become incredibly...

9:21Katia Lundsuccessful, and there was no food at home. There were no jobs for them. The ones that were in the theatre group, they were lucky because they could continue to do their theatre and be together. But even so, it was hard to reconcile, you know, these big parties, and a lot of them had to find different ways to survive. Douglas Silver, who played Little Zay, is now a successful actor, but others weren't so lucky.

9:48Speaker 4City of God, which was produced by O2 Films, became one of the most influential foreign-language movies of its time. The film school, which is now called Cinema Nosso, is still going. Katya Lund continues to write and direct. She was speaking to me, Reena Stantonshama, for Witness History. If you've enjoyed this story, check out some of our other episodes, including one I made about the Indian film, Rung the Pasenthe.

10:17Speaker 4or another program on the epic Japanese film Seven Samurai. We love to know what you think, so please leave us a review. Tell your friends about what you've heard. And don't forget to hit subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Bye.

10:48Speaker 11I was walking in space, the first man ever to do so. I felt almost insignificant, like a tiny ant compared to the immensity of the universe. Listen now, search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Before Achilles found glory and Odysseus eventually found his way home, someone had to compose the Iliad and Odyssey, but was there credited author?

11:18Greg JennerHomer, even real. Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of Your Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously. And we are traveling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war, and triumph and have a laugh while we do it. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.