Maria Worton is a Montreal writer and activist.

The film Cidade de Deus is a remarkable film for having absorbed 3 million Brazilians in its full length mirrored warts-and-all-reflection. The title is taken from the name of a hillside slum, one of over 600 necklacing Rio de Janeiro. Here, garbage rots where it drops, raw sewage festers, and water comes by the bucket. From the opening frames: a flashing blade sharpening on a stone in readiness for the capture of the teetering chicken, a ground-upward view of L'il Ze, a ruthless gang leader who, with the cry, "Catch the chicken!", enlists in a frantic chase the service of the runts, a posse of street kids. It's clear that the chicken's lot is a poor one, in fact it doesn't stand a chance. The scene can serve as an allegory of the film because in the pecking order of oppression you know where the chicken stands.

City of God , based on the book by Paul Lin and directed by Fernando Mereilles and Katia Lund, functions as a frenetic loom, weaving individual biographies into a convincingly tall tale about the rise and fall of a brutal gang amid corruption and vendettas. The history leading back to the chicken is conveyed in narrative driven flashback, delivered in a giddying mix of many elements including sharp editing, freeze framing and insider narration, creating a tension, an exuberance as well as an intimacy that is unsentimental but never detached. The story is told by amateur photographer, non-gang member Rocket, whose sober, laconic eye is a counter-weight to the what-next-action.

There is emotion in a showing (rather than telling) quality of the film. This seems to allow for a level of moral and ethical complexity no doubt deepened by the fact that nearly all the actors are non-professional and recruited from the favela where they helped work-shop the script. So the film does not shirk from chronicling what poverty does to people, how it criminalizes and sabotages the best-laid plans

It delivers playful moments too like the poke it takes at the gang's macho swagger. L'il Ze wants to raise the gang's profile with a photo splash in a major newspaper. It's a funny, poignant scene that offsets the gang's image-consciousness against a squalid backdrop to a big-fish-little-pond scenario. No amount of big gun toting is going to get them the attention on the outside that a photo shoot will and only Rocket knows his way round a camera. For a brief moment the innocuous Rocket has all those big guns and killers in the palm of his hand.

There's plenty of quiet sentiment too in the film, a look here a touch there. We see that gangsters love, and are made not born (though some clearly have a talent for the job). L'il Ze has just such a talent and though a mass murderer he is also pathetic in his loneliness and inability to feel enough trust and self-worth to relax into any expression of tenderness. His cohort and childhood friend Benny falls in love and entreats L'il Ze to do the same, though all too late. L'il Ze is damned by the sure knowledge that compassion makes you vulnerable in the favela. He is, predictably, crushed by Benny's untimely death.

There is a terrible amount of violence in the film, but it's never gratuitous, or titillating for that matter. According to the study (part-sponsored by Unesco) Child Combatants in Organized Armed Violence, nearly 3000 people are shot dead in Rio every year; only Angola is more violent. The film reflects this reality. Shooting, more often than not, is simply a way of expediting a solution to a problem. Horribly, children kill children to survive the tortured logic of the gangs. There's one very sorrowful scene of this nature I wonder about how they managed to film.

This is a world where Peter Pan's Lost Boys have a little Hook in them, where parents are absent and childhood is often a curse. Rocket is one of the few characters whose parents are somewhere in the background. He attends school, unlike the runts who are only schooled as delivery boys in the thriving cottage industry of cocaine and crack production. They deliver that which fuels the management of pain, the affliction of abandonment but also feeds hungry mouths.

"Unacted desires breed pestilence," Blake wrote. It's perhaps an even meaner kind of poverty portrayed here; one that rubs shoulders with the wealth and comfort of rich neighbourhoods. Privilege experienced as a world to be seen and never touched functions as a nagging source of humiliation. Benny nurses a desire for a sweeter life but first must endeavour to make himself fit for leaving the favela. In a subtly telling moment he engages the services of a middleclass addict whose image he happens to covet. In exchange for drugs Benny asks to be kitted out and even reddens his hair in a comic effort to match that of his white style counsellor, who, paradoxically, is slave to a drug habit rather than any sense of fashion.

With Rio's daily scourge of kidnappings, hold-ups and killings, this film reflects how gang power and drugs can fill the vacuum left when housing, jobs, benefits and public services go. Some Brazilians have called it disloyal to a country struggling to hold its head up. Well you know what happens when you stab at a sore. 20 years down the road the statistics are grimmer now than they ever were: In Rio almost 4000 under 18's have been killed between '88 and '02, more than 8 times the combined number of Palestinian and Israeli children killed in the same period. Military style policing has met with equal violence from gang factions, in armed combat that invariably kills innocent people.

Though spanning a period from the 60's to the 80's City of God shows a poverty we know is here and now. By keeping history and local environment at its centre, the film neither glamourizes nor condemns and can suggest an immediate impact of globalization. The film is soon to open in the US where the economist Amartya Sen has shown that African American men have a life expectancy lower than men in born in China, Kerala, Sri-Lanka and Bangladesh. The US, where government in 2002, according to the National Council of State Legislatures, cut 49 billion dollars in public services, health, welfare benefits and education and has plans to cut another 25.7 billion this year.

In the end the familiar cluck and flutter of one harried chicken signals the story has come full circle; the ending is in the offing but a happy one would seem to require a miracle. From the hair-raising debacle of its finale perhaps a kind of miracle is had. But not by the runts, scuffling away barefoot down an alley, at once tragic and yet momentarily spared too by their enthusiasm for the hit-list they're concocting. Against all the odds they count on the next moment being a safe one. They are being human in the way their environment allows them to be. In staying so true to life City of God is a powerful and political film.