Ulysses de la Torre

NEW YORK, May 24 2005 (IPS) — Anderson Sa was 10 years old when he first witnessed a murder. Outside a store in Vigario Geral, one of the most violent of Rio de Janeiro’s 600 favelas, or shantytowns, a man was dragged out of a car, beaten, and then shot in the head. Anderson’s reaction as a 10-year-old boy?

”I’m not afraid of death.”

This jarring account opens ”Favela Rising,” a 78-minute documentary about the evolution of the Brazilian AfroReggae movement from a musical form that served as neighbourhood cultural newsletter, to artistic expression as an alternative to drug-trafficking in Rio’s infamous favelas – and about the man at the centre of it.

The film, directed by Jeff Zimbalist and Matt Mochary of the United States, won the best new documentary filmmaker award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival here.

Anderson, as he is commonly known, first conceived of AfroReggae in 1993 during a period of especially tense relations between favela drug lords and local authorities. Rio police invaded Vigario Geral and killed 21 residents in retaliation for a local drug lord’s assassination of four extortionate officers. The image of 21 corpses in the Plaza de Vigario quickly became an anti- postcard for the city and Anderson began to think of ways to combat police brutality and the violence of drug trafficking.

He realised that no collective identity in favelas existed outside of drug trafficking and that children lacked positive role models. His answer: a community-based group seeking to lure kids away from the riches of dealing drugs by offering cultural alternatives such as instruction in music, the Brazilian martial art of capoeira, art, dance and filmmaking, to name just a few. Their recruits, according to Jose Junior, chief coordinator for AfroReggae, consisted of ”destroyed people infected by idealism.”

”When areas are abandoned or neglected there often is an attitude of ‘We’re never going to rise above until we get someone from the outside to come and save us,’ which is a paternalistic model. It has a lot of built-in problems, it’s not sustainable,” co-director Zimbalist told IPS. ”As soon as the funder or whoever the charitable entity is decides they want to move on to something else, well now you’re just as desolate and just as abandoned as you were before.”

Originally intending to chronicle AfroReggae as a movement, Zimbalist and Mochary escort us through Vigario’s maze of concrete shacks characteristic of Rio’s shantytowns to show us the context from which AfroReggae arose. They follow police raids, talk to teenagers old enough to be drug soldiers and pre-teens aspiring to enter the drug trade, and even arrange permission to film active drug soldiers cleaning their guns, though Zimbalist said in a recent interview that every drug soldier featured has since been murdered.

While the violence of Brazil’s favelas has gained increasing attention in recent years, thanks in part to news accounts and the widespread release of the 2002 film ”Cidade de Deus” (City of God), Zimbalist and Mochary sought to find a story beneath the immediate one so typically depicted of the urban poor. Hence their focus on the microcosm of asset-based inside-out community development that is AfroReggae.

”There are so many stories about crises and conflict and our world views are shaped by media, so we start to see the world as a place falling apart if you just watch these things over and over again,” said Zimbalist, whose previous social service work in the developing world has taken him across Latin America as well as to Kathmandu in a stint with the U.N. Development Programme.

”And when you dig into any community I’ve been to in the world, if you look hard enough, you can find people overcoming those odds. People dreaming alone – it’s just a dream. When people dream together, it’s the beginning of a reality. If you tell those stories as well, I think people’s world views in general start to transform, start to mutate, they see other people like themselves in communities that do work. So I think we sort of picked up where City of God left off in that respect,” he added.

Anderson, who expected to die before turning 20 (he is now 26), speaks in the film about his childhood dream of becoming a ”Top Gun” in Vigario, and that the only thing he really ever feared was immobility. Halfway through the film’s production, Anderson’s worst fears come true – a freak surfing accident leaves him paralyzed in the hospital, facing an extremely high likelihood of spending the rest of his life as a quadriplegic. The film’s focus quickly shifts from the general AfroReggae movement to the specific struggle of its leader who, after growing up with the most formidable obstacles imaginable, is now faced with the challenge of a lifetime.

More than one-fourth of Rio’s eight million residents live in favelas, but as Zimbalist points out, favelas only refer to illegal squatter slums – several more of Rio’s poor in legally settled slums still face identical issues of poverty, drugs, and lack of opportunity. Among Vigario Geral’s estimated population of 20,000-30,000, the number of known drug dealers has dropped from 150 to approximately 15-20 since AfroReggae’s inception, and of those remaining dealers, none are local. They all come from neighbouring favelas to serve whatever market demand persists.

Grupo Cultural AfroReggae works with more than 2,000 young people in nine favelas and its steady success in providing a suitable, sustainable development model has attracted attention from such private philanthropies as the U.S.-based Ford and Rockefeller foundations. How the group spreads its message without interfering in other communities is an ongoing concern whose balance Anderson addressed directly.

”AfroReggae cannot help everybody. Each community has its own problems,” Anderson told IPS. ”Each community has its own social project. The way that AfroReggae can help is by just including others in the social project. People can watch what AfroReggae is doing and try to apply it on their own to their communities.”

”In order for your development or your progress or your mobility as a community to be sustainable,” added Zimbalist, ”it needs to come from the people within, the people who can’t live any other way.”