"Olympian dreams and favela realities collide in Rio de Janeiro -- the documentary Dancing With the Devil depicts what's at stake if the city fails to get its act together"
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Two faces … Cariocas celebrate Rio's Olympics bid victory on Copacabana and a scene from Dancing With the Devil. Photograph: Sergio Moraes/Reuters
Rio is justly proud of its Olympic bid victory. But the documentary Dancing With the Devil depicts what's at stake if the city fails to get its act together
The Rio Olympics announcement on Friday was undeniably exciting and even moving. I was there for the Rio film festival and found myself on Copacabana beach, crushed in a screaming, hugging crowd. A Brazilian friend of mine in the film business beamed: "It's just like Slumdog Millionaire getting the Oscar!"
In a first-world country, the traditional fear is that the arrival of the Olympics is the cue for waste, chaos and snouts in the trough. But such cynicism is evidently one of many things that Rio de Janeiro has not been able to afford. So the sky-high hopes here over the weekend is that the new visibility of the city and all that is now expected of it for the 2016 Games, and indeed the 2014 World Cup, means that that at last money will have to be seen to be spent on public services and infrastructure, and something will be done to dislodge the complacency, stagnation and political mediocrity which threatens to turn Rio into an eternal valley of upper-middle-class prosperity and extreme wealth, encircled by the favelas.
Just before showing up at the beach, I had watched Dancing With the Devil, a horribly fascinating documentary showing in the Rio festival's Latin Premiere section, directed by Oscar-winning film-maker Jon Blair and co-produced by the Guardian's Rio correspondent Tom Phillips.
The film follows three Rio characters: Leonardo Torres is one of the bulky cops on the frontline of the war in the favelas; Spiderman is a drug lord and favela capo, and Pastor Dione is a former drug-runner who now runs an evangelical outreach mission in the favelas, and whose pragmatic policy it is to engage with the drug dealers. Everyone in the favelas, when they speak of their plight, has access to an instinctive religious rhetoric – especially the drug lords. Talking about what Jesus wants and how Jesus sympathises with their suffering and overpowering need for survival is as instinctive as breathing.
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I am happy that Rio did receive the Olympics....but, it ends there as many of us who read know the absolutely deplorable conditions that exist for the many poor people who live there. Will this provide work, yes. Will they be able to pull this off? We will see.
Corruption being the mainstay in the government there. Security issues? I wish them the best, but hope we do not have to spend money to make it safe for our athletes. Flashing back to the games in Greece, many of our athletes stayed in Navy vessels off the coast in the Mediterranean at the U.S. expense.
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