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Meirelles and Lund used as their major source Paulo Lins’ autobiographical novel City of God. At one point a woman from a shantytown describes her feelings of helplessness and characterises the teenagers as suicide-seekers who have lost all sense of self-protection. In João Moreira Salles and Katia Lund’s 1998 documentary News from a Particular War (Notícias de una guerra particular) the irreconcilable viewpoints of the bandits, the police and those caught in between became an element in the structure. It covers of lot of ground and sometimes pays a price – for instance, as an action film it omits any explanation of the overall logic of the international drugs trade, concentrating instead on the most visible side of the game: the scandalous death of children involved in illegal trafficking and the intimidation of members of the local community. The film examines the escalation of violence from the ‘innocent’ robberies performed by these inexperienced amateurs in the 1960s to the organised cocaine wars of the mid 1970s to which the survivors graduate. This is what Rocket tells us in one of his first voiceovers at the start of a long flashback that describes the origins of a young gang known as the Tender Trio: Shaggy/Cabeleira, Clipper/Alicate and Goose/Marreco. The area of Rio de Janeiro known as City of God is a huge housing complex created in the 1960s as part of a conservative programme to eradicate the favelas on hillsides close to the fancy beaches by forcibly relocating their thousands of inhabitants to the periphery.
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