Filmed on Location: The Gangs of Rio de Janeiro

www.nytimes.com Miramax Films

Li'l Ze's gang in "City of God" by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles. The movie has been hotly debated in Brazil. It shows the world "that hell is here, just behind Ipanema," another director said. By LARRY ROHTER

RIO DE JANEIRO A CAST composed almost entirely of unknown actors, a setting that is none too attractive, a lot of violence and no sex scenes. If ever a studio wanted a formula for a film to fail, that would be it," said the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles.

As he was shooting in the slums here two years ago, Mr. Meirelles worried about the commercial viability of the movie he was making. Yet "City of God," which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, has become a watershed cultural and political event in Brazil, and has now been seen by more Brazilians than any film in nearly 30 years. Advertisement

Every aspect, from its unblinking portrayal of criminality to its innovative cinematography, has been endlessly analyzed and discussed, to the point that Brazil's new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is reported to have said that seeing the movie made him change his policy on public security.

"City of God" ("Cidade de Deus") takes its title from the best-selling novel by Paulo Lins, which in turn is named for a gigantic housing project built here in the 1960's and where some 120,000 people live today. Mr. Lins grew up there, knew the real-life characters portrayed in the book and film, and watched as drug gangs gained a stranglehold over the community.

"The book was the fruit of 30 years of observation and 10 years of research," he said in an interview at his apartment in the middle-class neighborhood where he now lives. "From the time I was a little kid, I watched what was going on around me, so everything that appears in the book is real, and that reality is exactly what the filmmakers wanted to capture."

When "Cidade de Deus" was published in 1997, it became an immediate critical and popular success in Brazil, in large part because it showed slum life from the inside — and did so without condemning the people who live there. A friend of Mr. Meirelles gave the director a copy of the book with the suggestion that it might make a good movie.

As it happened, Mr. Meirelles (pronounced mere-ELLIES), who is 47, was then at a crossroads in his career. He had always wanted to make feature films, and had directed several television programs and documentaries, but had drifted into advertising and become probably the most successful director of commercials in Brazil.

"I had won Clio awards and all the other prizes you can win, but I was at that point when you start asking if there isn't something more," he recalled.

Mr. Meirelles's proposal to film "City of God" was one of eight that Mr. Lins received, including some from directors much better known and with experience filming in Rio's favelas, or hillside squatter slums. But when Mr. Meirelles outlined his calculatedly risky plan to cast amateurs from Cidade de Deus and other slum neighborhoods, the balance shifted.

"It was the idea of using actors from the favelas that really moved me and won me over," Mr. Lins said. "The money was almost the same in all of the offers, but Fernando's vision of the project was the most interesting."

Once that hurdle was overcome, the sheer Dickensian sweep of the novel offered Mr. Meirelles his next challenge. At 550 pages, "City of God" has nearly 300 characters and covers three decades in the slum's history: an early 160-page draft of the script won a prize at a Sundance Institute workshop held in Brazil, but even so, a dozen drafts were required before a filmable version was completed.

As a white raised in a middle-class São Paulo neighborhood, Mr. Meirelles faced an additional problem, that of credibility. The American equivalent of the situation he confronted would be a native of the Upper West Side of New York City deciding to go into Los Angeles' South Central to make a movie about black gangs and expecting to be received with open arms.

To ease his way, Mr. Meirelles decided to enlist a co-director, Kátia Lund. Originally from São Paulo, Ms. Lund is of Norwegian descent and a Brown University graduate but had made several Brazilian rap videos in the favelas and had also filmed "News From a Private War," a highly praised documentary about the drug gangs of Rio's slums.