OLJK danas - četvrtak 14. srpnja - program

Citat: › I ask Martha Martinez, the 38-year-old Colombian who runs the Medecins Sans Frontieres health centre, if she has seen City of God. 'Not a bad film,' she says. 'But it's worse here.' Outside her office the medical centre is full of young mothers and wailing babies. None of the men is especially interested in talking to journalists.

Later I find out from official sources exactly what has been going on in Marcilio. While the Commando Vermelho had control of the favela, things had been quiet. Bodies had turned up every 10 days or so, but 'nothing excessive'. Then the 23-year-old local 'don' was killed. None of the major traffickers live past their mid-twenties, so no one was surprised.

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The director's story

I meet Fernando Meirelles in the offices of a production company in Soho an hour before he is due to fly to New York and Los Angeles. Meirelles is in London to direct a film of John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener later this year. He is honest about his ignorance of the favelas before he made City of God. 'I lived in Brazil for 46 years. I knew nothing about the slums. I just saw small news articles in the newspaper like "Two boys shot dead" and I had no idea how those two boys got to be there,' he says. 'Rio is this incredibly hedonistic city, like a playground, and then there is this other side. There are two societies, with different lives, different problems. It is like an apartheid. The middle class has no idea.

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