Max’s new series features a whole deluxe pilot episode to get into the story. And when I talk about that first luxury chapter, I’m not referring to the series itself. It’s the movie City of God, whose plot continues the series twenty years after what we were told then. This is neither a spin-off, not even a rebootbut one direct sequel in which we see both the protagonist and many of his supporting characters two decades later. With the film, Meirelles masterfully demonstrated that it is not necessary to set the film in New York the big ones gangster stories. In a tape that had nothing to envy of those of Scorsese It showed us life in a marginal underworld dominated by crime and drug trafficking where at the slightest thing one could get shot in the head or encounter armed children who behaved like real psychopaths“I’ve smoked, I’ve snorted and I’ve killed. I’m a man like you,” said one of these infantrymen to justify his being allowed into the gang. The film was released in 2002, the same year that HBO premiered The Wire, a legendary title in drug trafficking stories on television.

The new series takes us back to that underworld with the question of whether it will be able to live up to its cinematic predecessor. The television production abandons the more documentary format which had the length to offer us much more stylized and careful images, but just as violent. The first episode has served to reunite us with several of the characters who survived the film and see what has become of them twenty years later while leaving the way prepared for the plot of what we are going to be told throughout the six episodes that the first season has. A warning, the series already has been renovated for a second season. Although Meirelles does not direct this series and limits himself to acting producer workthe film maintains the style of this already cinematic classic. Its premiere is a great opportunity to discover the film to all those who have not seen it. Put with the analogy of the pilot of a television series, it could well be compared to one of those productions of Netflix set in the 80s, since it was in that decade when the plot of the film took place.

In the television series, the action jumps to the first decade of the 2000s, just when Meirelles’ film was released and shortly before Lula da Silva becomes president of Brazil. We will have to see if the Brazilian political situation has an impact on the plot, and I would dare say yes because we have already been introduced to a corrupt politician as the main character. If we continue to renew seasons, will we get to the years of Bolsonaro? Because the film already covered a long history of the favela.

The protagonist is still Buscapé, a young man with aspirations to be a photographer through which we saw life in the favela. On many occasions, he did not even intervene in the events that the film showed us, but rather His eyes and his camera are what allow us to see what’s going on in there. Twenty years later, he is already a well-established and prestigious photojournalist, thanks to his origins, which allow him to access places where the media did not have the capacity to reach. In the first episode, we see that he now calls himself Wilson and is looking for a change in his work, fed up with portray death and violenceHowever, the years of relative calm in the favela seem to be about to end with the release from prison of one of the characters we met in the film and who aspires to take his piece of the pie. In their own way, here too they fight for the iron throne.