News from a Personal War

The battle between Rio's police and the drug dealers who rule the city's hillside slums, or favelas, is an ongoing story in which most Brazilians have lost interest. The filmmakers interview policemen and teenage drug dealers who seem equally resigned to killing each other; they enter jails and police training facilities, and follow cops and drug dealers up and down the hillsides. The interplay of shots becomes an indictment of a failed social order in which the ceaseless violence has no larger meaning. It's just personal. With short Golden Gate (Fernando Meirelles, Katia Lund, Brazil, 2001, 21 mins).

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