Lessons of streets and screens: in the wake of the hit film City of God, its young "stars" are pursuing movie careers as an alternative to the violence and dead end of Rio's favelas, where most of them still alive.

• Author: Rogers, Douglas
• Position: Interview

In the old, cobblestoned neighborhood of Santa Teresa, a hilly enclave away from Rio's famed beaches, a group of young inert are attending film class in the spacious top-floor room of a rambling colonial villa. Aged in their teens and twenties, they shuffle in wearing sandals, shorts, and scruffy T-shirts and take their places on the smooth parquet floor. Today, their "teacher," film and documentary maker Katia Lund, is giving them a crash course in the harsh realities of the film industry. "You've had a lucky break," she says, "but it's not going to be like this every day. You are poor kids from poor areas. There are not many jobs for black actors in Brazil. It's going to be difficult for you, but you have to keep working hard, studying hard, and helping each other. It's important we keep the group together." The kids listen with a mixture of focused intensity and fidgeting disinterest. Then they excitedly begin planning the short film they will soon be shooting in Rocinha favela.

Through open windows at the back of the room a view of Corcovado lights up the sky, but the fifty boys in this class are far removed from picture-postcard images of arguably the most picturesque of the hemisphere's cities. They come front places such as Catumbi, Penha, Canta Galo, Rocinha, and Cidade de Deus--City of God. These are the favelas, notorious hillside slums and shantytowns scattered across Brazil's second-largest city. One million people live in Rio's eight hundred favelas, but normal rules of society do not apply here. Rio's favela's are like separate states with their own laws and codes. Each favela is "owned" by a drug lord, a member of one of the three rival drug factions that control the city's cocaine trade, and to the residents of the favela, the police and the state are the enemy. According to "Child Combatants in Organized Armed Violence," a UNESCO-funded study recently published by the Viva Rio nongovernmental organization, more children are dying in armed violence in Rio's ravels drug wars than the in most official war zones, including Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Colombia. To work for a drug faction here is as normal as learning samba, and to see child soldiers as young as eight armed with Kalashnikovs, grenades, and rocket launchers patrolling their streets at night is commonplace.

A film career is thus an unlikely option for a kid from the favelas. And yet the children in the film class this afternoon recently became some of Brazil's hottest new stars.

It is four years ago now that the Sao Paulo film director Fernando Meirelles, inspired by Paulo Lins's book on growing up in City of God, decided to make a movie about a real favela drug war. Meirelles wanted to use favela children in his film, kids with little or no acting experience, to give it an authentic edge. The result, City of God, is a brutal, beautifully told urban epic about three generations of kids involved in the drug gang violence that sprung up with the arrival of cocaine in Rio's favelas in the late 1970s. Released last year and already the biggest grossing Brazilian film of all time, the film revealed to the world the brutality of life in Rio's slums. President "Lula" da Silva personally endorsed it and encouraged his political rivals to see the film to understand how poor people live in Brazil's favelas. A new multi-million dollar project to regenerate sad improve safety in Rio's slums--starting with the City of God favela--was recently launched, a direct retort of what the film revealed.

But for all its power, the making of the movie, and the stories of the children plucked off the streets to act in it, are every, bit as extraordinary.

"I wanted to re-create the reality of the hook and to do that I needed real kids," says Meirelles, a soft-spoken forty-seven-year-old who made his name as Brazil's leading commercials director in the 1990s. "I needed 120 children who knew the codes of the favela, the language, the laws, the way the drug gangs work. But I'm a white, middle-class guy from Sao Paulo. What do I know about the favelas?"

He went to Katia Lund. Lund, thirty-six, is also a white...