MORRO DOS PRAZERES

In 2011, a special police unit moved into the Hill of Pleasures, a favela in downtown Rio formerly controlled by a cartel. After years of police violence, the residents look on this pacification with a mistrustful eye. Each of the six people followed by Maria Ramos is placed on a physical or symbolic threshold: the frontier between adolescence and adulthood (with the consequences in case of arrest) for Brulane, whose androgyny also stands on a gender frontier; the role of community cohesion for the postman and women’s football coach, who describes the siloed existence of the inhabitants in a nutshell: “We were islands… Now bridges are being built by those our community hates most”. How can one accept help from one’s enemy? How can law and order be made something that must be accepted, if not desired? With a sense of framing and rhythm that confirms the achievements of her earlier films on Brazil’s legal institutions (Justice and Behave), Ramos finds the correct balance between the chronicle and the portrait. In two sequences particularly (a party, a funeral), this observational documentary ventures right to the edge of fiction – and recalls James Gray’s We Own the Night… (Charlotte Garson)