Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

City of God (2003), the critically acclaimed film about Rio de Janeiro’s favela by the same name, has been criticised for presenting violence as detached from its political and historical context, but it has also been lauded for its demand for social visibility of the “reality” it conveyed, not least because of its cast of non-professional actors and use of documentary techniques. 17 years on, a group of residents from City of God have begun to produce a different type of documentary about their community. Whereas in the original film the camera of the main protagonist functions as an “inventory of death” (Diken, 2004), in the hands of these residents the camera becomes a tool against the violence of non-representation and a struggle for symbolic power and capital. A visual ethnography of the documentary filming process conducted by the author shows how the documentary makers resist representations in the film through visual and linguistic discourses that build a sensitive perspective of the structural and symbolic violence favela residents encounter, while also producing new and more hopeful images regarding City of God. The documentary filming process becomes a form of “insurgent citizenship” (Holston, 2008), that is, an explicit form of civic engagement and political action that challenges stereotyping images through counter-narratives against social exclusion.