 Starring: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino, Phelipe Haagensen, Douglas Silva
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Year Of Release: 2002
Plot: Two boys live in the City Of God, one of Rio’s slums. As they grow up in the dangerous but colourful environment, Bene and Rocket’s lives begin to take different paths, one becoming a photographer and the other a drug dealer. With multiple characters and stories, the film explores the pace, poverty and danger of life in the City Of God as the favela becomes the scene of a major drug war in the early 80s. |
In the late 90s and first half of the noughties, there was a lot of talk about a Central and South American film renaissance after a slew of great movies and interesting directors emerged from the continent in the space of just a few years (of which City Of God was a part), with suggestions the area was about the become a major filmmaking force. However in the past few years, the fervour has subsided and very few South American films now get decent distribution. While some of the filmmakers are still around, they’ve largely headed off to Hollywood and are now making movies there.
Over the space of a few years we had amazing movies like Walter Salles’ Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien, Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s Amores Perros, Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth (although both films are set in Spain, Del Toro is Mexican) and, of course, Fernando Meirelles’ City Of God. However in the past few years, there been very little coming out of South and Central America that’s set the arthouse world on fire. So what happened?
Well, pretty much what always happens when these little bubbles of great filmmaking emerge from particular areas of the world, as it’s a predictable pattern. It normally starts with a single film or filmmaker, or in the case of South America, a bit of a combination. 1998’s Central Station, which garnered a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Fernanda Montenegro kicked off the interest, which was compounded by the fact that following sojourns into Hollywood filmmaking for Alfonso Cuaron (A Little Princess and Great Expectations) and Guillermo Del Toro (Mimic, Blade II), both returned to Spanish language movies.
With a couple of lauded filmmakers and critically praised films, money started flowing into South American filmmaking as the world started to take notice. This allowed other talents like Inarritu and Meirelles to emerge and make movies they’d have probably found it very hard to fund or get distribution for a few years before.
However these things are never set up in a sustainable manner, and so Hollywood comes along and throws money at emerging talent to get them to leave their home nations and make English-language films for them. That’s what happened with nearly all the main filmmakers from the so-called South American renaissance. Cuaron went off to make Harry Potter 3 and Children Of Men, Del Toro directed Hellboy, Meirelles shot The Constant Gardener and Blindness, Inarritu made 21 Grams and Babel, and Walter Salles directed Dark Water.
This drained the area of its best-known talent, but that didn’t stop distributors from around the world buying up South American movies, but rather than just buying the very best, second rate movies got picked up for distribution because everyone wanted to jump on the bandwagon, but because they weren’t very good they were inevitably ignored at the box office. At this point the distributors got bored and instead of buying everything going, a more normal state of affairs re-emerged, where a few movies South American movie get distributed in the west, but most are roundly ignored, and even some excellent films, such as Salles’ Linha De Passe, don’t get the sort of marketing push they’d have received only a couple of year before.
However, while it looks the South American filmmaking has gone back to struggling on the international film stage, the bubble of a few years has given us a few very good filmmakers (and thankfully none of them have completely abandoned their home continent and still support emerging talent there).
These sorts of bubbles are always emerging and bursting. For example, around the same time as South American movies were big on the arthouse circuit, there was the j-horror phenomenon, when pretty much every Asian horror movie got bought up for distribution around the world. It started with The Ring and from there it exploded, with more and more films getting released in the West. Then Hollywood starting hiring the directors of these films for its production (which was a far less successful enterprise than it was with the South and Central American directors) and buying up the remake rights for a seemingly never ending series of English-language do-overs.
However the films picked up started getting worse and worse as demand outstripped supply (as did the Hollywood remakes, which soon started being based on decidedly second-rate movies) and distributors decided this meant the phenomenon was over. Even though overall the quality of films being made in Asia hadn’t gone down, it was just that there were so many of these coming out in the West of varying quality, that audiences started to tune out because it appeared things were going downhill. And as one the bubbles faded, less money flowed into filmmaking in the area, which made it even more difficult to make really good films.
No doubt more of these bubbles will emerge. My bet on the next one is Russia and Eastern Europe. There’s been a few interesting things going on in the area, and directors like Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch, Wanted) hint that in the next few years it may be this area that distributors head off to and mine for all its worth until they’ve stripped it dry.
There’s one other thing I think is worth pointing out about City Of God, and that’s the fact that while it was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Screenplay, it wasn’t nominated for Best Film In A Foreign Language. The reason for this is the peculiar way the nominees for that category are chosen. While to be eligible for most categories at the Academy Awards, a film has to have been shown at a commercial cinema in LA for a week before 31st December of the previous year, in the Best Foreign Language Film category, this doesn’t have to happen. Instead each country puts forward a single movie for consideration that was released in its country of origin the previous year. This means that potentially a foreign language films can win awards in other categories as long as it was released in LA the year before, while not even being eligible for the Oscar that would seem its natural home, as it wasn’t submitted.
The choice of films is left up to a committee from each country, which of course means that the best movie doesn’t always get put forward, as often political considerations come to the fore. However City Of God was Brazil’s official entry, but got scuppered by the next part of the nominations process. For most categories, all eligible Academy members are allowed to vote for the nominees, but with the Best Foreign Language film, a very small committee who’ve had all the films screened for them choose the nominees, and they decided there were at least five other films better foreign language films than City of God that year and it didn’t get a nomination. (Canada’s The Barbarian Invasions eventually won instead).
The peculiar nominations process often causes some odd results in this category. For example, Pedro Almodovar’s Talk To Her was easily Spain’s biggest arthouse hit of 2002 internationally, and won the Best Foreign Language Golden Globe and BAFTA, and picked up the Oscar for Best Screenplay, but wasn’t even eligible for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, as Spain submitted a different movie for consideration in that category. Likewise Marion Cotillard won the Best Actress Oscar for La Vie En Rose, but the film wasn’t eligible for the Best Foreign Language category, as France could only submit one movie and they went for Persepolis (which ended up getting nominated for Best Animated Film but not in the Foreign Language film category). Then there are movies like The Motorcycle Diaries, which was a co-production involving companies in nine different countries. None of those nations could claim the film as being specifically theirs and so none could submit it as their entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, so it
was ineligible (even though it won Best Original Song).
Although it all seems rather unfair, the category has to be a compromise to ensure those voting for the potential nominees have actually seen all of the movies and that there’s a manageable number of films to make this possible. As a result there’s only one film per country allowed (and while all Academy members can potentially vote for the eventual winner from the list of nominees, it’s nearly the only category where they have to guarantee they’ve seen all five nominated films on the cinema screen in order to be eligible to vote for the award – even watching it on DVD doesn’t count). The result is a very imperfect award, but at least there is an attempt to ensure the Best Film wins, rather than the single hit foreign language flick that potential voters have seen. It does mean some great movies get shut out though, and it really would be worth the Academy attempting to find a better way of doing things.
TIM ISAAC
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