Héctor Babenco directs Fernando Ramos Da Silva, Gilberto Moura and Marília Pera in this Brazilian drama looking at the tough lives of street kids as they move from borstal to criminal careers.

Grim, miserable and unrelenting. We start with the gang rape of a child and eventually end with a whore rejecting her pimp for being too young. Nothing inbetween has any hope or joy in it. Powerful, raw, didactic… and of interest if you are curious to see what the City of God kids’ grandparents were getting up to (surviving, not surviving) a few decades before. But no one’s idea of a good time.

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