Dancing with the Devil

This documentary by Jon Blair (whose storied career has won his an Oscar, Bafta and 2 Emmys) is a thoroughly engrossing in depth look at the ongoing battle between Rio de Janeiro's drug traffickers and its police. It covers similar ground to films like "Elite Squad" (Tropa de Elite) which focused mainly on the police and "City of God" (Cidade de Deus) which was more about the favelas and the traffickers. Dancing with the Devil ties the two factions together and presents an intimate portrait of the fairly miserable lives of soldiers on the front line, presenting the complex reality of human life without merely resorting to "good guy/bad guy" clichés.

The film focuses on three main protagonists: Pastor Dione, an ex-trafficker turned evangelist preacher whose mission is to save the souls of the young men in the drugs trade; "Spiderman", the charismatic leader of one of Rio's main drug gangs; and Inspector Leonardo "GI Joe" Torres, a muscle bound, cigar chomping mean machine of a drug cop.

It's Pastor Dione that adds a new dimension to the story. Evangelical protestantism has been sweeping through the streets of Brazil over the past few years and so it seems fitting that a man like Dione should play such a key role in the film. It's through him that the film-makers were able to cut through the tough guy gangster facade and get to the real heart of characters like Spiderman, who pleads that he wants to get out of drugs but doesn't know how - but he hopes Jesus will show him the way eventually.

Rio is a city full of contradictions and Dancing with the Devil highlights them well. It's an unbiased portrait of an urban sprawl at boiling point, where drug lords run benevolent dictatorships and cops are locked into a seemingly endless (and arguably pointless) cycle of violence that only begets further violence. It's a city where everyone says that they don't want to fight, but every day they lock and load and head once more into the breach.

Dancing with the Devil is a gripping 100 minutes and well worth seeking out on the Channel 4 on demand service in the UK or trying to find on DVD.

The tragedy of Rio de Janeiro's favelas has been documented before; but rarely with such astonishing footage as is shown in 'Dancing With the Devil'. The grim truth - slums controlled by drug-dealing gangs, and a police force which, either through internal corruption, or simply through the fact that it possesses no monopoly of force, acts much like another gang - means the lives of the city's poorest inhabitants are often nasty, brutal and short. Jon Blair's film isn't bad, although it labours its point a little, and neither the drug lords we see interviewed (claiming to want a peaceful life, but making no steps to achieve it) nor the supposed hero, a somewhat egoistical preacher who seems a little too forgiving of the worst of the gangsters, make appealing subjects: Angus MacQueen's recent, masterful series for Channel 4, 'Cocaine', told a much more poignant story. But the ending is still terrible and compelling, as a thoughtful policeman reflects on the meaning of life and death, and we learn that time has run out for one of the film's principal criminal protagonists. And as in the fictional (but very real) 'The Wire' (David Simon's drama set in the drug gangs of north America), one is struck by how young all the leading dealers are; this is a young man's game, and there's no happy retirement when your time as boss is done.

The images are valuable because the people doing the reporting got to see where tourists with iPhones don't get.

What makes everything depressive is the life of those people. They are poor. And they want to survive. There is no education. Only all sort of psychopaths running around with weapons and armored cars. In that place doctors do not go. Educators do not go. Nobody who has every made it seems to go there unless that person wants to kill, rape or maim. So on top of all of this reason is thrown out of the window the minute it is detected. Religion, imaginary friends, blocks and blocks turned into an insane asylum. And than you find out the source is outside the asylum. A general with a nice job, a nice pension set aside for him, a nice car and many other advantages comes to open up the roads than he goes back to his large house with a well paid family. If only the money of these leeches would have been invested in the community and the murderers would be left to find a honest job and pay for their own pension plan, maybe things would be different.

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