"A picture could change my life. But in the City of God, if you run away, they get you, and if you stay, they get you too." Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles' City of God offers a variety of explanations for the violence it depicts, but ultimately presents violence - within the city and within its characters - as something beyond representation, comprehension, or escape. Motives are suggested, but shown to be insufficient to account for the level and pervasiveness of violence. Alternatives to violence are articulated, only to be undermined. The formal strategies adopted by City of God are themselves violent, resisting easy synthesis or understanding. The film places the
viewer in a removed spectatorship, suggesting a sense of omniscience and control which proves, in the end, false.