City Of God Themes

Words: 829
Pages: 4

City of God is a great example of a Latin American humanities piece. By being a Brazilian film made by Brazilians in the Portuguese language and centering around a Brazilian city this movie is clearly a part of Latin American humanities. From the opening, and the “Beginning of the End” scene, everything from the music to the imagery of a street teeming with people to the food to the general atmosphere allows us to easily see that this is Latin, not Anglican, America. As we look closely at the movie, we can see what separates a favela from the hood in a city in the United States. Although many similarities exist, enough separates the two. Apart from the obvious language difference including different slang, we see differences in the people from both the gang culture and the innocents.
There are plenty of less obvious but more indicative Latin
…show more content…
Everyone in the City of God seems to live for one purpose and that is usually to acquire as much power and wealth as possible. Most notably is Little Z’s lust for power and riches, which also comes with a thirst for violence. Although not exactly conquistadors fighting for gold, the youth of the city essentially became soldiers for hire by the point of the “civil war” in the movie. As a result, and going tandem with cupio is this theme of violence throughout the movie. Lil Ze’s solution is almost always to kill his opponents. He may be the most extreme character, but it seems as if everyone either perpetuates violence or just becomes a victim of it. Similar to the common native belief of sacrificing others for power, the top hoods in the film have no problem sacrificing others for their goals and the young boys just wait for someone to die so they can be promoted. The scenes were filmed in neighboring favelas because of how dangerous the City of God is even with a decrease in crime since the time the movie was set in. This serves almost as proof of