While “Favela Rising” is an absorbing documentary about a crime-ridden slum in Rio de Janeiro and a former inhabitant who, through the use of music and dance, inspirationally rises above his surroundings to help turn kids away from drug dealing and gangs, it can’t quite transcend its material they way its hero has.
The film opens with the disturbing statistic that 3,937 children were murdered in Rio between 1987 and 2001, also right away introducing someone who could so easily have been one of those unfortunate kids: Anderson Sa, who grew up in the slum of Vigário Geral.
He describes the first murder he ever saw when, as a 10-year-old, a man nearby was shot in the head as a result of yet another gang-related dispute, the noises of which he heard every night as he went to sleep. As he grew older he himself moved closer to this world, actively involved “on the edge” of the drug scene, while never actually selling drugs themselves.
Sa recounts how, as kids, he and his friends, quite a few of whom are now dead, used to play cops and robbers, with all of them wanting to be robbers. When his brother was killed in 1993 after a retribution raid by police saw 21 people being randomly executed, he could so easily have made the same choice, this time all the way in. That’s when he decided that the answer to the question of “how can you fight” the hatred and violence of police and criminals instead involved peaceful means.
He started up a radical homemade newspaper, AfroReggae News, about reggae music and politics, and a band, AfroReggae, that is as much a movement as a successful act playing a mixture of reggae, African-Brazilian music and hip-hop. Through workshops and free concerts, they have reached out to kids considering a “dead-end” criminal life and offered them a way out through a lifestyle that eschews violence and drugs. While Sa acknowledges that for every one initiate they get, several others go to the gangs, every one counts, with drug gang activity in Vigário Geral having been dramatically reduced as a result.
Anderson Sa is a very charismatic figure, with a personal and professional life fraught with obstacles and remarkable triumphs. This documentary is very much about him. But as the film progressed I wished that the focus had widened, capturing more of the perspective of those he was trying to help.
How they live, what they think of him and what in particular AfroReggae and Sa have done for them is too often described through the eyes of Sa, his family, friends and colleagues, rather than the kids Sa is trying to save. So while we see footage of thousands of exuberant young people cheering at his concerts a lot less is seen of the journey from when there were only audiences of tens.
I also think it would have been good to explore, possibly through more interviews with locals, a little more how dangerous and treacherous conditions some favelas can actually be and what this means for the everyday life of inhabitants. While the filmmakers gamely try to get further up the hills of the favelas they understandably back off upon hearing tales of what grim repercussions could befall them if they came across the wrong people.
Having said all that, Favela Rising is definitely worth checking out. In environs where it is quite easy and very sensible to keep your head down and hope for the best, one man did try to rise up, and bring as many others with him as possible.
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