Broken City

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Rio de Janeiro is known as the Wonderful City, with a jaw-dropping geography and 763 favelas hanging from mountains that should make up a post card of humanity... but it doesn't... The city grows without any efficient urban planning. The geometric increase in crime in Rio de Janeiro and in many other Latin America cities is caused, among other things, by one common factor... the lack of popular housing policies. Allowing invasion is easier than building and the unassisted favelas multiply. Fearing the State might remove them from a land that is not theirs, the inhabitants close themselves inside the borders. Without the presence of law enforcement, crime sets up inside the favelas and spreads unhinged. In the neighborhood of Leblon, the fanciest part of town, there is a housing complex for people with low income... Cruzada São Sebastião. It's two bodies that do not mix... it's a block within the city, that segregates and is segregated, mixing drug traffic with honest workers who are forced to subject themselves to the local and illegal laws, since the State has lost its territory there. Cruzada is a microcosm of what has happened in the city. BROKEN CITY is a documentary that analyses the criminality increase in Rio de Janeiro through the history of CRUZADA and its inhabitants, trying to understand how Rio de Janeiro regressed to a feudal regime, where favelas are countries within the country... ruled by drug dealers with their own armies and their own economic autonomy.