Cidade de Deus favela celebrates 50th anniversary with Slum Literature Festival

Rio's Slum Literature Festival (FLUPP) began on Tuesday (Nov. 8) and celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Cidade de Deus favela community, spotlighted in Fernando Meirelles's 2002 film, City of God.

First held in 2012, the annual festival this year brings together over 100 authors from 20 countries, who until November 13 will be discussing such issues as racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Author Júlio Ludemir, one of the creators of FLUPP, notes there is always something new at each edition of the festival. In 2012, when it was created, the festival ventured into book production, helping showcase authors from the favelas. In 2014, it introduced poetry slams. Last year, there was a literature competition for elementary school students.

This year, FLUPP is innovating by keeping the memory of the favela. “We realized the favelas are very eager to document their history,” said Ludemir. The accounts of older residents referred to as “founding residents” are being written into comics form. The authors of these comics will compete for a FLUPP Comics Award, and besides having their work published, the winner, who will be chosen from among Brazilian and foreign contestants, will be awarded tickets to the 2017 Angoulême International Comics Festival in France.

Another new feature of this year's FLUPP, in addition to an exhibition on the fiftieth anniversary of Cidade de Deus, is the use of virtual reality goggle technology to tell the story of young black people killed in Rio de Janeiro slums. Julio Ludemir thinks virtual reality will be part of life in the society of the future. “People have been writing on that, and we're using this powerful technology to talk about Rio's dramatic tale of young people being killed nearly on an industrial scale. Brazil is the country that most kills young people in the world.”

Caio Fernando Abreu

This year's honored author is Caio Fernando Abreu, an author from Rio Grande do Sul state who died with HIV 20 years ago. “He was chosen because of the quality of his work, and for being an icon of Brazil's homosexual literature,” said Ludemir. He thinks Abreu's writings reveal an “existential periphery” that speaks to the “territorial peripheries”. “And somehow this leads us to the realization that there can be no territorial periphery without an existential periphery.” Ludemir is sure that if Abreu were alive, he would still have a sharp eye for today's generation and would continue to incorporate elements of the daily lives of young people into his literature.

Unlike what most people think, the curator says, favelas are defying the “illiterate-stupid-people-who-enjoy-carioca-funk” stereotype, and their young entrepreneurs are making their way into higher education and changing life in their communities.

Translated by Mayra Borges