Framing the on-going social war: peripheral convergences in Brazilian and French cinema

Enquadramentos da guerra social contemporânea: convergências periféricas entre o cinema do Brasil e da França

Abstract:

The present article analyzes convergences in the representation of violence and conflict in the peripheries of Brazil and France by looking at a selection of films. We juxtapose scenes from said films to reflect upon both the process of peripheralization of one of the centers of capitalism and on the similarities and differences this process has with a peripheral society. In this way, we discuss how societies as different as Brazil and France can produce films narratives with similar languages and structures. The hypothesis is that if cultural products converge, we can assume that convergent social processes also exist, even if these also demonstrate profound differences. Our analysis of these scenes reveals possible approximations between France and Brazil arising from the manifestation of periphery elements in a central capitalist country. Based upon this, we draw conclusions about the present state of generalized war within the global capitalist system.

Keywords:
Periphery; Brazil; France; Cinema; Social War.

Resumo:

Este ensaio analisa as convergências na representação da violência e dos conflitos nas periferias do Brasil e da França por meio de uma seleção variada de filmes. A partir de um método de justaposição de cenas, o presente ensaio busca refletir sobre o processo de periferização do centro do capitalismo e sobre as semelhanças e diferenças com uma sociedade periférica. Dessa maneira, discutimos como sociedades tão diferentes entre si, como Brasil e França, são capazes de produzir narrativas fílmicas com linguagens e estruturas semelhantes. A hipótese do trabalho é que, se há uma convergência nos produtos culturais, pode-se supor que há também processos sociais convergentes, ainda que guardem profundas diferenças. A análise das cenas escolhidas evidência aproximações possíveis decorrentes da manifestação de elementos da forma-periferia em um país de capitalismo central das quais tentamos extrair conclusões sobre o estado presente de guerra generalizada no interior do sistema.

Palavras-chave:
periferia; Brasil; França; cinema; guerra social

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps a comparison between two scenes from different films would be a good way to introduce the fundamental difference between life in Brazilian peripheries and French banlieues. At one point in the film Bac Nord (2020), a detachment of Marseille police¹ has been cornered at the gates of a cité by dozens of heavily armed drug traffickers. The criminals are more numerous and are in their territory. The situation is tense. We expect a massacre. Both groups are pointing weapons at each other; faces show the expectation that something decisive will happen. There is a lot of shouting and gesticulation. Everyone’s life hangs by a thread. And then… nothing happens. No shots ring out. After a few minutes, the police retreat without anyone being injured. The film continues.

The film Elite Squad (2007) opens with an incursion into a favela by two rogue members of the Rio de Janeiro police. This quickly devolves into a shootout between the cops and local drug traffickers, with hundreds of civilians caught in the crossfire. Rio´s Special Police Operations Battalion - BOPE - is mobilized to intervene. In the dénouement of the operation, the battalion’s commander, Captain Nascimento, receives a call and learns that his wife has gone into labor. After celebrating the news with his subordinates (while surrounded by dead bodies), Nascimento hands the operation off to his second-in-command officer and goes to the hospital to be present for the birth of his son. This is an event that will change his life.

A latent war for some, an everyday war for others. But it is, nevertheless, a war.²

Armed violence typical of a war is thus a fundamental difference between the French scene and the Brazilian. There is, however, also a marked convergence: In both scenes, we witness a markedly violent relationship between police and local groups characteristic of peripheries. Whether latent or overt, both films point to organized violence as the norm in the periphery. French or Brazilian, the underlying scenario is the same: war.

The following brief essay aims to analyze this common ground of violence and conflict in the peripheral life of contemporary capitalism by looking at a selection of French and Brazilian films.³ Here, we will employ film analysis to consider social processes that highlight the dissemination of the periphery as a given form of urban life across the planet (Canettieri 2020), bringing together France and Brazil without reducing the one to the other.

Guided by the thesis of the Brazilianization of the world (Arantes 2023), we believe that convergences caused by the generalization of peripheralization (Canettieri 2020) can be demonstrated through an analysis of cultural products - in this case cinema. We argue that there are social structures are increasingly disintegrating in all parts of the world, especially in the contexts of urban organization and the fragmentation of the world of work. Seemingly disparate places show that societies across the globe are heading towards a sort of negative equality in terms of the fundamentals of their lifestyles. At their extremes, in particular, different societies are becoming increasingly similar.⁴

The element that seems to drive this convergence is war. The end of the Cold War was also the moment when the structural crisis of the modern commodity-producing system became evident (Kurz 1993). Capitalism, as we understand it, is a mode of social organization based on the sociability of labor. At the same time, however, it is also a hostage to automatic and contradictory developments that de-substantiates their own social forms. During the twilight of the 20th century, the crisis of valorization became evident. This was caused by abrupt leaps in productive forces that increasingly eliminated living labor from productive circuits, eroding the social nexus sustaining work itself as a fundamental organizing concept for society (Kurz, 2014). The ever more rapid dissolution of labor-based sociability was coupled with a lack of any alternative taking its place in the social nexus. In a negative inversion, violence gradually became a fundamental mode of social relations - perhaps the fundamental mode (Canettieri, 2020). Under these conditions, a new type of war began to take shape, a war no longer fought by organized armies or under the rubric of a just war. This new form of war takes place in a context in which “the distinction between the state of peace and war tends to become increasingly fluid” (Lyra de Carvalho 2023: 188). In several works, Paulo Arantes (2007, 2014, 2019) has highlighted how the concept of war has been transformed in recent decades.⁵ In the present essay, we look at war in this contemporary sense. For our purposes here, war designates a “permanent state of exception” oriented by a necessarily provisional reorganization of sociability in crisis capitalism. This is based on violence of various types (mockery, police violence, state violence, and criminal violence, among others). This state of molecularized global civil war (Enzensberger, 1995) disseminates the practice of violence as a way of managing crisis, producing a “security society of managed collapse” (Canettieri 2020). Practices of violence that were previously restricted to the peripheries of the peripheries now manifest themselves also in the organic center of the system - a kind of “boomerang” (Graham 2016). This molecular and capillary war spreads through all the interstices of social life. We argue that it has also become a basic raw material for all the different branches of the world’s cultural industry.

This is the case with cinema. The constructions of film narratives, scenes, and editing reveal a social process underlying. In a pioneering essay on the type of analysis that we are developing here, Fredric Jameson (2017) analyzed the series The Wire, in which the apparent social duality resulting from the process of the peripheralization of the United States constituted a fundamental aesthetic expression of the social structure of the first decade of the new millennium in that country. The duality was apparent because the process of social form in the capitalist system is dialectical: its poles are reciprocally implicated. In the case of The Wire, Jameson notes that Baltimore’s black ghetto and wealthy center and suburbs appear to be separate spaces but are actually intertwined. We maintain that the same type of fundamental relationship occurs in the cases of France and Brazil. Our starting point is the fact that French and Brazilian films present similar languages and scenes. This fact, in and of itself, seems indicative of an analogous underlying social process. Through the analysis of films produced in Brazil and France, we intend to demonstrate how peripheral forms of the so-called “Global South” also manifest themselves in the “North,” thus discussing the dynamics of peripheralization underway in contemporary society. How and why are two societies, in principle so different, producing such similar films? What explains this?

Our essay begins with the connecting films in a constellation. Placed side by side, they offer raw material thinking about the tendency of the global system to become peripheralized (Arantes & Lyra de Carvalho, 2021). We are partly psychoanalyst Christian Dunker’s book Mal-estar, sofrimento e sintoma (2015), which uses a series of films to think about contemporary Brazil. In his chapter entitled “Narratives of suffering in Brazilian cinema during the Retomada” (Dunker 2015: 82-98), Dunker traces a fifteen-year path of national film production that goes from Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil (1995) to Elite Squad II: The Enemy Within (2010). According to Dunker (2015: 84), “one of the hallmarks of this period was the varied forms of return to the tradition of ‘representation of the country’, as was the case in Cinema Novo”. What interests the psychoanalyst here is thinking about Brazil through the lens of cinema and less the films themselves. Alternating between brief commentaries or scene analyses, as well as analyses of soundtracks and contexts, the author uses each film or scene to illustrate a specific social problem and the correspondence between what the film production portrayed and what Brazil was experiencing in its daily political life, as well as what was being produced at the time by national social theory. Cinema thus functions here as a mediation, reinforcing and illustrating, in an original way, the analysis of Brazilian society’s new ills. Our procedure in the current article is inspired by Dunker’s, as we also believe in the capacity of cinema to create unique theoretical and socio-political mediations, but it differs significantly in the way we will treat the films we look at. Here, we will juxtapose a series of films and scenes to show the object being referred to. It is in the comparative analysis between films and the setting of the two societies that our analytical object will emerge. It is from this juxtaposition that we believe we can obtain an image that shows the unresolved nature of social problems, as well as expresses the privilege position that cinema has in order to think dialectically - that is thinking through through the contradictions embedded in the social process being represented and in the representation itself.

We are interested in exploring possible parallels between films that inform about the current state of peripheral conditions in France and Brazil (Canettieri 2024; Lyra de Carvalho 2025). We focus here on certain kinds of films: films released and circulated outside of cult circuits. This means that we will be looking at films that are more-or-less involved in producing the mainstream entertainment provided by the cultural industry. This is what allows these films to reveal a fundamental part of reality: after all, the films do not hide their ideological character.⁶ We proceed with an analysis of fragments taken from these films, dialectical scenes that simultaneously condense similarities and differences between Brazil and France in the representation and experience of urban peripheries portrayed.⁷ To this end, we have divided the text into five different parts, which we will call “scenes”. Each scene refers to the others without any one taking precedence over the others. They are Scene 1: State, crime, and violence in the peripheries; Scene 2: Young people’s diminuishing horizons of expectations; Scene 3: Ideological pacification; Scene 4: From the threshold of individual revolt…; Scene 5: …to collective and organized revolt. In each of these scenes, we briefly analyze two films (one Brazilian and the other French) that directly address the problem, without, however, linking them in the finer and more detailed way they deserve. On the one hand, the reader may feel that there are several “loose ends” sprinkled throughout the text. On the other hand, the speculative effort of this approach allows for different ways of thinking and questioning some commonplaces of capitalist modernity that posit well-defined boundaries separating the center from the periphery. If it can be argued that there are some problems in our use of this method, but we make this choice for objective reasons, since contemporary reality itself has already taken on this fractal form.

SCENE 1: STATE, CRIME AND VIOLENCE IN THE PERIPHERIES

Elite Squad, by José Padilha (2007), portrays the workings of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police’s Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE). This is an elite battalion dedicated to special missions, somewhat analogous to SWAT units in the U.S. The film takes place in 1997 during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Brazil. It shows a series of police operations aimed at dismantling any threat to the Holy Father that could possibly come from Rio’s drug traffickers. After the first scene above, a fade-out occurs and the battalion’s logo - a skull with a knife stuck in it over two crossed pistols appears on the screen with the name “Elite Squad”. Drums and distorted guitars play in the “new metal” style that mixes rap with heavy metal, performed by the band Tihuana. The soundtrack energetically intones a chorus song that repeats over scenes of police operations in Rio de Janeiro, including helicopter flights, armored vehicles, and shootouts: “Elite squad, a tough nut to crack, catches one, catches another, and it will catch you too”. Faced with this series of images flashing over the driving music, even the most innocent citizen feels a chill, fearing they indeed might be the next target.

The fact that BOPE operations are almost exclusively carried out in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro is no coincidence. The military doctrine that prevails among Rio’s public security forces has listed retail drug trafficking as a priority enemy (Rodrigues 2025). Drug retail workers, operating in an illegal market that moves rivers of money and forms enclaves of armed power in the city’s territory, can access weapons and heavy military equipment with relative ease, often due to corruption within the Brazilian police and armed forces themselves. The solution to this problem has been the ostentatious use of State forces against these territories, acting like an army taking over an enemy nation. This strategy has culminated in the creation of Pacifying Police Units (UPP) which have become central to the security policy of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Despite the State’s legitimate monopoly on the use of violence (and its merciless employment of it), the film shows that the situation on the ground is much more complex.

As the film progresses following the main character, Captain Nascimento, we discover the interconnected channels between crime and the State, structuring a symbiotic relationship that forms another actor in illicit economies: Rio’s militias. They utilize the very structure of public security for their illegal activities, dominating territories and imposing violence as a means of managing these areas. Today, it is known that they operate in the same illegal markets they claimed to combat.

According to director Padilha, Elite Squad was intended as a critique of brutal and indiscriminate police actions in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The film - and particularly its sequel, Elite Squad II - shows that enemies can be embedded within formal power structures while simultaneously operating illicit markets and controlling territory through arms. However, the film was received by the public in a very different, practically opposite way. A considerable part of the Brazilian population interpreted Captain Nascimento⁸ as a hero fighting bandits in the name of the law. Action figures were produced (mostly illegally) and then sold by street vendors to children who dreamed of joining the Battalion that in the film’s torture scenes. The cry “ask to leave”, chanted by the police officers during the brutal BOPE training sequences depicted in the film quickly became a popular slogan. It was chanted in football stadiums, during school games, and even in workplaces. Understanding Elite Squad’s reception is therefore key to understanding the social context in which it is situated as a cultural product. By understanding a film as a kind of social seismograph and perceiving how it was received, we can begin to understand how just beneath the veneer of optimistic Brazilian democracy with a popular federal government, violence was already circulating and setting the tone for wider Brazilian society.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call the film Bac Nord, by Cédric Jimenez (2021), the French Elite Squad. Narrated from the perspective of three police officers patrolling the northern area of Marseille - one of the most ungovernable urban regions in France - we access to the inner workings of French public security policy, which - like its Brazilian counterpart - is rife with corruption and violence.⁹ The group of officers, driven by quantitative performance targets to guarantee promotions and salary increases - the arrival of neoliberalism in the daily workings of the police? - steals drugs from traffickers, fabricates seizures, and even traffics some of the seized goods back to the traffickers. On the other side of the narrative, gangs of young people living in the banlieues coexist daily with misery, segregation, and despair. Crime seems to be an uncertain opportunity for these young people to live in minimal conditions. Not by chance, as Jérôme Fourquet (2019) notes, if it were a single company, the world of crime would be the largest French employer. Another curious fact portrayed in the film is that the police officers themselves engage in illegal actions with the aim of securing economic gains, like a kind of overtime.

As depicted in the Brazilian film, the French film portrays the connections between the police and the state’s administrative structure as a particular way of managing certain social forces to promote individual gains. While there is no territorial control, and it’s not exactly about militias like in Elite Squad, there is a significant convergence between the practices of the two countries if we consider that the police in Bac Nord also operate illicit markets to make money.

The way violence circulates is another important point of convergence. The characters are constantly at a high level of anxiety and aggression. These emotions are presented as intrinsic elements of police life. Violence is a principle of social mediation, and the police forces participate in this differential management of everyday life in the periphery. Furthermore, it is the police themselves, that is, the representation of the State’s monopoly on violence, who also act in the management of (il)licit markets,¹⁰ and are not there to “fight crime,” but to “manage illegalities.” Illegality has become a fundamental category used to describe dynamics that occur in the periphery that move between the legal and the illegal.¹¹ Perhaps it is a reality inherent to the contemporary urban periphery that necessitates this constant negotiation of the boundaries separating legal and illegal. The fact that they have also become a mode of cinematic representation of the action of the French State seems to indicate confirmation of the hypothesis of the peripheralization of the center.

SCENE 2: YOUNG PEOPLE’S DIMINISHING HORIZONS OF EXPECTATIONS

Les Misérables, by Ladj Ly (2019), borrows its title from Victor Hugo’s classic and begins with a scene echoing the French Revolution. An indistinct mass huddles beneath French tricolor flags on the Champs-Élysées, taken in a wide shot. Smoke in red and blue rises into the air. The camera zooms in, revealing young Black men wearing French national football team uniforms celebrating the country’s World Cup victory. From there, scenes rewind, showing the same young men leaving their homes, taking subways and trains. Viewers realize that they live in the distant suburbs of Paris, far from the world’s most famous avenue, the setting for the film’s opening. Following this opening sequence, which depicts an effusive moment of celebration, the film’s plot unfolds.

We are quickly introduced to the often-aggressive police patrolling practices carried out by police officers Ruiz, Chris, and Gwada and directed towards the “civilians” of the Montfermeil region. We follow the patrol and are introduced to Issa, a Black pre-teen, already understood as a delinquent by his community. Issa steals a lion cub from a local Roma circus. The Roma subsequently go to the “Black” area of the region and threaten the community leader with weapons. Ruiz, Chris, and Gwada’s squad are mobilized to recover the lion cub.

Although the film’s main plot revolves around the unfolding events surrounding this informal police “mission”, Issa stands out as his story runs parallel to the main thread of the film, allowing us to explore the scenario in which the story takes place. Issa is a young Black man understood to be a delinquent in the community who seems to commonly petty crimes. He is a peculiar character because, despite his central role in the plot, he has few spoken lines and is often so somber his visage shocks the viewer given, that Issa is barely older than a child. Several scenes depict Issa’s daily life, notably his visits to dilapidated environments, such as an abandoned warehouse of broken furniture.

The film’s final scene can be interpreted as a cathartic allegory for the situation of young people in the French banlieues and a foreshadowing of a possible radical reaction from them. On the other hand, may be interpreted as the ghost of French society in its tense relationship with the banlieues, analogous to the Brazilian social myth that when the favela finally “comes down from the hills”, not a stone will be left standing. In this finale, young people clash with and corner a police detachment inside one of the buildings in the cité. The situation is ambiguous: the group of youths alternate between being a political organization and a rebellious gang. Amid the confusion, in a confrontation with State power, fireworks are used to set a police car on fire with. A weakening of or attack on local power also occurs. The black community leader complains to the youth about their fighting with the police and is in turn beaten, with Issa delivering the first blow in the revolt against the informal government of the banlieue. The film concludes with Issa, armed and silent, about to hurl a Molotov cocktail at a policeman in an act of radical revolt against an agent of the formal State government. We are left in suspense as to whether this radical act actually occurs or not. Most importantly, however, the film’s director seems to suggest that such acts carry a radical ambiguity. On the one hand, they appear as pure apolitical, destructive nihilism and not an emancipation. On the other hand, the concluding extreme violence against the dual power that dominates the youth’s territory can also be seen as a necessary and radical first step towards any sort of collective emancipation.

City of God, by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, is a 2002 Brazilian film based on the novel of the same name by Paulo Lins, published in 1997. More so than in the film, it is in the book that we find a structure like that of Les Misérables.

In the opening paragraph, which is subtle, we find the classic patterns of Brazilian popular life, in all its grace. While sharing a joint with a friend, Barbantinho dreams of the future. [...] In the following pages, perhaps somewhat hesitantly written, this gentle and optimistic constellation will be challenged by poverty, unemployment, and, above all, by the first corpses floating in the river that runs alongside the favela. Another aspect of popular life that will prevail. (Schwarz 1997)

The film’s cinematography makes explicit the raw realism present in the book. The scenes aren’t exactly graphic, but they more than detail the recurring acts of violence that make up the young protagonists’ lives. The young people of the City of God favela live on a tightrope, surviving daily shootouts. Every day could be their appointed encounter with their Creator. The film makes it clear that these young people have few expectations regarding the future.¹² Their violent practices aren’t merely a sign of virility or courage, but the very condition for their continued survival. The only possibility for life seems to be to continually themselves in a general dynamic of violence. They know their life expectancy is extremely low, and the film confirms this in several moments.

A rather famous and cruel scene encapsulates this situation. At one point, Zé Pequeno, a teenage local crime leader, catches some child thieves in his territory. After torturing them by shooting them in the foot, he asks one of his subordinates, another child slightly older than those being tortured, to choose one of the two as the victim for his first murder. In two minutes, we witness the absolute banality of life, morality, and the future of all the characters involved, who are all revealed as victims, instigators, and murderers in the heat of the moment. There is no deeper reflection on the radical nature of the youths’ acts or how these might appear necessary for survival. The film simply establishes this violence as a dark social norm: a purely destructive nihilism. Nothing positive can emerge from this situation.

City of God’s narrative form adopts a circular structure in relation to the passage of time. The situations depicted in the scenes are repeated from the perspective of different characters, who come and go, reinforcing a sense of time that is non-linear. It’s as if these youths’ experience of time is replicated among the viewers. Both are trapped in a presentism¹³ that structurally prohibits any expectation of a future.

In both films, young people’s expectations are presented as radically short-term. The violence they experience is ambiguous. It can be purely destructive, or it can be a necessary corrective for the situation the face. The youths’ experiences are reduced to the immediate present, preventing them from planning or even imagining a different future. The living conditions of the present crush the possibilities of liberation from web of violence and precariousness that bind these young people. In this way, the youths reproduce the scenario in which they find themselves, always aware that they live one day at a time, without long-term plans and without the possibility - or even the apparent need - to develop any.

SCENE 3: IDEOLOGICAL PACIFICATION

It seems there is no doubt that the doctrine of pacification is synonymous with war. Let us remember that both the enlightened police officer and the popular politician who together advocate Pacifying Police Units (UPP) in Rio de Janeiro say that these are an alternative to “open confrontation.” They claim that any use of armored vehicles or helicopters in the favelas is undesirable, but necessary, resulting in much “collateral damage.” The UPPs’ territorial occupation action are, in military parlance, surgical and limited, allowing for the creation of partnerships between the security forces and the local population. Strictly speaking, however, this never happens. Even in favelas where UPPs are installed and functioning, BOPE incursions and “open confrontation” operations continue to occur daily. In general, the UPPs have produced a militarized occupation of territories in the city of Rio de Janeiro without significant positive results beyond the direct domination of the State through the police. There are few to no social policies created as counterparts for the domination of these localities (Brito & Oliveira 2013).

In the feature film Interventção, by Caio Cobra (2021), we are introduced to two seemingly well-intentioned police officers working in a UPP (Pacifying Police Unit) in Rio de Janeiro. Despite being exhausted by violence and constant pressure, Larissa and Douglas seem to believe in the public security project they work for. Douglas is a police officer traumatized by the death of his wife, who was also a police officer. When he receives new recruits in his unit - recruits who, moments before, had endured a harrowing experience inside an armored vehicle while climbing the hill into the favela - Douglas tells them, “This is a pacification unit, so leave everyone in peace.”

After losing his wife, however, Douglas becomes a cynical police officer who makes deals with the local crime boss to reduce tensions in the favela, turning a blind eye to the crimes he should be fighting. This generates internal conflicts within the police team. The interesting thing, however, is that throughout the film, Douglas and his troop begin to “care” about the people of the favela. This contradiction is captured on screen. At one point, Larissa - dressed in uniform and a bulletproof vest, a pistol in holster and automatic rifle in hand - talks to a black child, comforting after a childish dispute. She swings the rifle with the sling over her back and hugs the boy in an apparently sincere way. In another scene, Douglas, less formally dressed than Larissa - that is, wearing only his PMERJ (Military Police of Rio de Janeiro) uniform - talks to some young people, giving them study tips. In these scenes, there seems to be a kind of “suspension” of the violent nature of police intervention (which nevertheless continues as a constant backdrop), transforming police activities into something akin to a counseling session. The point is that even this practice, visibly more friendly and humanized, is at its core part of the violent production of urban conflict management.¹⁴ After all, the pacification of the occupied zone continues. Although heavily armed, the police officer can also, at certain times, without relinquishing their weapons, demonstrate empathy for the local population. Such empathy is intended to be the spearhead of the State in the construction of new social bonds. It is no coincidence that one of the UPP’s advertising campaigns transformed the figure of the police officer into that of a teacher, doctor, etc. This suggests that the work of the police officer goes beyond what is imagined while also implying that these other professions share an affinity with the figure of the law enforcement officer, whether they like it or not.

Shifting our focus to the Parisian banlieus, we find an analogous structure at work in the film Entre les murs (The Class), by Laurent Cantet (2008). The film portrays the daily life of a school in the suburbs where the tensions present in French society are evident: racialization, poverty and a lack of prospects. The students don’t seem very engaged with learning. Do they perhaps feel that education won’t lead them to better living conditions? There are explicit and direct aggressive exchanges. On the other hand, most of the teachers appear demotivated by their work. Do they feel that education won’t transform the world, a sentiment that leaves them frustrated? The film’s narrative follows the story of François Martin, a French teacher responsible for a class of teenagers in this tense context. Despite the various difficulties the teacher faces, which leave him tired and disillusioned, the film suggests that there has been the creation of an incomplete “bridge” between teacher and students.

Perhaps this is the intent behind the film. Martin’s actions create a certain pedagogical hope that can overcome the walls - a concept that appears in the film’s French title but is skillfully represented by the cinematography, with its choice of very close-up shots. The school setting is depicted as a space without openness, surrounded by walls and fences, blocked off by closed doors. The classroom itself is claustrophobic, and the shots are dominated by close-ups. Martin is not a French teacher by chance: language itself constitutes a wall separating him from his students. On one side, we have the French language in its cultivated form, as taught by the teacher. On the other, there is the language spoken by the descendants of immigrants, somewhat assimilated by France but kept segregated in the banlieues. France prides itself on being a country where fundamental aspects of self-explanatory universalist discourses of modernity and emancipation are gestated through public education. This French thus portrays social separation through its use of language as a central theme. Although it exposes the separation, the film’s narrative structure - which revolves around Martin’s point of view - creates an expectation that it is still be possible to cross or even tear down the various literal, historical, and social walls, surrounding the students. It holds out the hope that segregation might still be overcome by French society. The film’s nature is therefore pedagogical. Little by little, the teacher wins over the students and learns to navigate the symbolic walls that separate him from them. He promotes debates about identity, about the formal and informal use of language, which attempt to incorporate the students’ demands. However, in building these bridges (which characterize the act of teaching that the viewer expects), the teacher pacifies social conflicts. Gradually, the students begin to resemble him. Here, we are witnessing the result of a civilizing form that is standardized by the State. This is emphasized when one of the students, Esmeralda, reveals that she has read Plato’s Republic. And she concludes: “it’s not a book for a skank, is it?”.

In this sense, Entre les murs can be read as an inversion of inclusive pedagogy and its various challenges. All the film’s ambiguity lies in this inversion. In an era of decreasing expectations (Arantes 2014), what was previously understood as civilizing takes on an opposite charge. Territorial occupation is conducted with the intent of pacifying and creating new social ties and structures in precarious localities, but this project ends up being reversed, reinforcing violence in and, in a certain, the marginality of peripheral territories. Education, the bearer of citizenship, does not fulfill its promises. In the French case, Martin promotes the pacification of the social tensions compressed between the various walls of the school through a pedagogical mechanism organized from top to bottom by the State. Pedagogical practices - whether these involve in-class debates or disciplinary procedures - end up not only to educating students but also shaping their behaviors. They contain dissent and maintain a functional order in accordance with the expectations of the school system. They pacify conflicts that might challenge the very structure of the educational institution itself, were they to allowed to escalate. Thus, while there is a contrast and an unequal distribution of power between teachers and students from the periphery, the film ultimately portrays the victory of the center over the periphery insofar as the former incorporates the latter according to its norms. This incorporation, however, is always already incomplete: the French periphery must be reproduced as a critical lived reality. We can see this in the finale, where Esmeralda - whose sister is studying law - reveals that she wants to become a police officer. The route out of the banlieu, then, is to become a member - more or less rarified, more or less professionalized - of the security State that maintains the very walls themselves.

Whether it’s the police officer producing teaching in social projects in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, or the teacher producing police officers in the banlieus of Paris, the center leads to the ideological and effective pacification of the periphery by promiscuously mixing the role of violent repressor and generous pedagogue.

SCENE 4: FROM THE THRESHOLD OF INDIVIDUAL REVOLT…

La Haine (Hate), by Mathieu Kassovitz (1995), follows 24 hours in the lives of three friends - Vinz, Saïd, and Hubert. They live in the Parisian suburbs; their racialized bodies confined within the banlieues. The film begins at a fast pace: the viewer is thrown into a night of violent clashes between the young inhabitants of the periphery and the French police. As we learn after a few minutes of action scenes, the revolt erupted following the beating of Abdel, a local youth, by the police - recurrent practice in France. Amidst tossed stones, Molotov cocktails, and cries of revolt, the film’s tension starts high as it portrays a type of confrontation in the French suburbs which has been common since at least the early 1980s. As Julien Bordier (2011) notes in an essay reflecting on its 15th anniversary, La Haine was the first film about the French banlieues to achieve a wide audience and recognition from critics and the film industry. Even Les Misérables (2019) did not go so far in this respect. With La Haine, the banlieues definitively enter the French cinematographic scene and gain a consistent representation in which French society recognizes itself (positively or negatively), becoming aware of a constitutive fracture. Both sides of the trenches recognized, in the film, the tensions experienced in their daily lives, which have only worsened since the film first came out.

Beginning the day after the beating, we follow the simmering revolt brewing within Vinz, one of the three friends. At a certain point in the film, Vinz - an angry and aggressive young man - openly declares that “If Abdel dies, I’ll kill a cop.” On the night of the riots, Vinz finds a firearm on the ground and keeps it. His plan is not only to avenge Abdel’s possible death, but to retaliate, directly and personally, against the violence experienced by his community and which he feels every day. The tension of the film lies largely in the possibility of this individual violence. One of the three friends, Hubert, tries to reason with Vinz. “Hate attracts hate,” he says, referencing the film’s title and what seems to be the guiding thread of its entire narrative. But Vinz doesn’t give in. He is consumed by rage and doesn’t seem willing to give up what appears to be the only thing that truly belongs to him: his hatred.

Jumping from the Parisian suburbs to the outskirts of Brasília, Branco Sai, Preto Fica (Whites leave, blacks stay), by Adirley Queirós (2015), takes as its starting point a real event: the racist police violence that occurred at a black dance party in Ceilândia, a satellite city of Brasília, on March 5th, 1986. The film’s story revolves around the lives of Marquim and Sartana, black men who were at the dance party and were victims of police violence. Marquim became paraplegic and Sartana had a leg amputated as a result. In the film, which portrays the first decade of the 21st century, Marquim runs a clandestine radio station from his wheelchair. He nostalgically plays the songs from the black dance parties of his past. Sartana, in turn, has become a “prosthetics mechanic,” adapting those he finds in the junkyard. As a hobby, he takes photos and makes drawings of the city. In addition to these two characters, Dimas Cravalanças appears on the scene. Dimas is a time traveler who comes from the future intending to find evidence of the “crimes committed by the Brazilian State against black and marginalized populations.”

As is well known, the first decade of the 21st century was marked by the presidency of Lula and Dilma, both Workers’ Party candidates. In theory, these were left-wing governments, allied with workers and the population in general. In practice, the violence of the Brazilian State against black and marginalized populations did not cease during this period. On the contrary: it grew, worsening to the point of becoming endemic.

The film’s structure is curious. Cravalança goes back in time on an official state mission. Apparently, in the year 2070, reparation policies are being implemented. Of course, these must be based on irrefutable evidence - hence Cracalança’s mission to return to the past to collect it. Marquim has another, more radical plan, however. He aims to create a sonic bomb to Brasília. In his clandestine radio station, he prepares the bomb to avenge the violence he has suffered. Cravalança tries to stop the attack, as it would prevent him from returning to the future from which he came. He fails. As he watches in astonishment as the National Congress and other symbols of the nation’s capital explode to the sound of “Bomba explode” by MC Dodô.

There is a connection between La Haine and Branco Sai, Preto Fica. Both films portray segregation and State violence against racialized and marginalized populations. In both cases, the protagonists - one armed with a pistol, the other with a highly destructive sonic bomb - violently rebel against the State, producing destruction as an outburst of individualized, ambiguous, yet radical revolt.

SCENE 5: …TO COLLECTIVE AND ORGANIZED REVOLT

Athena, by Romain Gavras (2022), is a French action film depicting the uprising of a housing complex of the same name after the brutal death of a local young man at the hands of police. The opening sequence sets the tone for the film: after the police press conference about the young man’s death, Karim, one of the three protagonist brothers, throws a molotov cocktail at the police station. Dozens of young people immediately join him, storming the building and stealing weapons from a safe. Despite being composed of youths, the group acts with great organization, like a squad readily trained for just such an incursion into a police station. The young people return to the Athena neighborhood, where hundreds more join the revolt. The violence rapidly escalates. The fundamental novelty is that in this film, violence is organized. The rebellious young people who follow Karim are not driven solely by an individualized and purely reactive catharsis. On the contrary: they act with the synergy of a trained battalion. It’s as if the social war has reached a new stage, as if a new kind of collective energy is accumulating in the banlieues. Together, the youths manage to protect the buildings of the housing complex, transforming it into an impenetrable fortress against the police. In essence, we witness a collective act of defense stemming from organized territorial resistance. The police gather at the edge of the complex and organize themselves to destroy the resistance in Athena. The ensuing confrontation is intense. What matters here, however, is the insurgency of a peripheral community that, historically excluded and violent, takes the reigns and collectively reacts. The interesting thing here is that the rebellious group doesn’t exactly formulate a demand that the authorities can meet: “We want this or that.” Instead, the film seems to suggest a more radical stance than the one often attributed to the banlieu revolts. As Slooter says, the explosion of violence erupting in the French suburbs “is not barbarism, but an ‘uprising’ or ‘revolt’ of the poor and excluded. It is a call for political measures aimed at reducing poverty and unemployment, promoting feelings of inclusive citizenship, and stimulating empowerment” (2019: 54). For Slooter, it seems that the insurrectionary movements of the banlieues could be resolved with well-intentioned “police measures.” Athena suggests the opposite. It argues that there is a kind of absence of common ground between the banlieusards and the agents of order. The rebels do not want to frame their demands in terms of “policy” because they know very well that public policy for local development is accompanied by violent and racist policing. It is no coincidence that a figure like Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, is the same person who formulated the income transfer policy proposals suggested by the World Bank to underdeveloped countries (Arantes, 2019).¹⁵ The collective of Athena’s residents rebel against the very structure of the segregated city, the racist police, and their social situation. Either everything is dismantled, or everything is lost: there seems to be no middle ground for any agreement or compromise. The resemblance to the collective defense of the Paris Commune - and the type of destructive repression it suffered - and other events of the same type is not mere coincidence. At the end of the film, two things happen. First, a terrorist attack destroys the Athena neighborhood, taking everyone with it. There was no possible negotiation. Then, the film concludes by suggesting that the conflict between the Athena insurgents and the police, coupled with the destruction of the housing complex, was the event that triggered the much-feared civil war in France.

In Brazil, the creation of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) criminal organization could be interpreted in a similar fashion. As Feltran (2018) explains, since its origin as a reaction to the Carandiru prison massacre, the PCC established itself as a prisoner organization and as a form of collective action. Based on the reality they faced-systematic disrespect in prisons and extremely high homicide rates in the peripheries-the group instituted clear rules for its organization and operation. Rules such as price controls on drugs, prohibitions against rape, unjust killings, and the use of crack cocaine in the favelas and within prisons led the group to consolidate its hegemony in the regimes of normativity and legitimacy in the peripheries of São Paulo.¹⁶ The film Salve Geral, by Sérgio Rezende (2009), addresses this, but in a fictionalized way. Rafa, a middle-class young man, is imprisoned for murder, and his mother, Lúcia, begins to visit him in prison. During her visits Ruiva, a lawyer in charge of defending one of the leaders of “O Comando” (as the criminal organization is called in the film), meets Lúcia and recruits her to do small illegal jobs. Little by little, Rafa and Lúcia find themselves immersed in the complex web of the criminal organization that planned and executed a series of attacks that paralyze São Paulo. In a dizzying montage, the viewer is taken from inside prisons - where men say “give a shout-out to everyone, now it’s a party in every neighborhood” - to scenes of simultaneous attacks occurring throughout the city. Buses are set on fire, police stations are riddled with bullets, curfews are imposed. This is an action orchestrated across the periphery, an uprising against the system. The criminal organization that emerges in this context is “the collateral damage that your system caused,” as the Racionais MC’s song would have it. The film thus illustrates a highly organized form of collective action that uses the structure of crime to exert power and retaliate against the system (in this case, motivated by the transfer of leaders to maximum security prisons).

Although starting from different triggers and methods, both films converge in their representations of peripheral collective action against “the system.” In both cases, collective action, - even criminal or destructive - emerges as an extreme language used by the sectors of society that have broken off - or never established - a functional dialogue with established power structures, resulting in cycles of violence and direct confrontation. In the French case, a total rupture occurs: a direct confrontation between society and the banlieues, which will have drastic and ambivalent consequences affecting all of France. In the Brazilian case, a parasitic criminal organization, operating within the prison system, fractures the functioning of the encompasssing society itself.

EPILOGUE

The various scenes presented here point to the convergence of the periphery form that has structured our argument from the beginning of the present article. Here, we have mobilized film criticism as a privileged way of demonstrating the peripheralization thesis. In Paulo Arantes’ critical philosophy one finds a thesis, paradoxical in principle, but which has been rapidly confirmed by the unfolding of the historical process. This is that the central countries of the global system are finally reaching the social configuration of the peripheries. This reverses liberal doctrines (and those of the progressive left) that the peripheries would move, even if only by fits and starts, towards the positions held by the center. The opposite has occurred. Already in the 1990s, intellectuals from the so-called Global North, the central countries of capitalism, began to use Brazil as a model of what was happening in their own domestic economies. Since then, this diagnosis has only been increasingly confirmed. The similarities in the form and content of the films we analyze here seem to point in this direction. It would therefore not be surprising to see that films, as cultural productions within a certain context, have begun to adopt similar aesthetic choices, even though they are created in socio-historical and cultural contexts that are, in principle, quite different. This observation is even more striking if we consider the differences in form and content that Brazilian and French cinema had, for example, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Cinema reveals broader social processes. It is the aesthetic manifestation of the peripheral form at the center of the global system, growing from within as a result of the unfolding contradictions of capitalist society (Canettieri 2020). Under these conditions, Kokoreff and Lapeyronnie (2013: 116) recognize that “the ghetto is a new configuration that imposes itself on the cités”. As a social form, the peripheral form thus becomes raw material for the culture industry. In this unfolding, which is an expression of the crisis of capitalism, there occurs “a true peripheralization of the center”, as Arantes claims (2023: 37). Elements that previously seemed restricted to peripheral territories now naturally manifest themselves in the center. This is largely due to the shrinking of the intermediate layers of society, which pushes the majority down the social scale. We are witnessing an erosion of the quality of life, with increased unemployment and precariousness, as well as increased violence. As noted by Guilluy (2019) and Bruno Astarian and Roberto Ferro (2019) there has been a visible erosion of the Western middle classes that has radically reconfigured the social landscape. Although this process is absent from the films we discuss here, it accompanies them as a backdrop and is, in fact, one of the fundamental axes of the peripheralization process. From the point of view of both the middle classes and their respective peripheries, we can affirm that this process is a consequence of the structural crisis of capitalism that has generalized the everyday horror of the periphery and made it ubiquitous. This movement of social restructuring is the premise of the antagonisms exposed by the films we have analyzed here. As Paulo Arantes (quoted in Arantes & Lyra de Carvalho 2021: 273) states:

With the subsequent prohibition of the somewhat imaginary expectation of overcoming underdevelopment, the recognition that life would still reproduce itself with the social characteristics inherent in an unprecedented degradation that, of course, had a correspondence in the organic center of the system, which was also beginning to become peripheralized with the continued implosion of the work society to which the post-war commitment had been made.

The erosion of the world of work reverberates throughout the world and is linked to urban erosion and restructuring, both in Brazil and France.¹⁷ Violence is becoming omnipresent in both societies, although on different scales. Social warfare, whether in its present or latent, appears as a common horizon in both societies. How to counter these trends remains a mystery. The trends themselves are ambiguous and can point to new emancipatory forms, or, paradoxically, reinforce social violence. The latter case is characteristic of the far-right reaction that has been rapidly gaining ground in both societies and beyond.

We began this article by commenting on two films that focus on police life in this situation of generalized socio-political-economic crisis. In Brazil and France, as well as elsewhere, the police forces have become, in part, the armed wing of the new far-right regimes. As Tropa de Elite and Bac Nord show, it is not there that we will find a way out of our global social dilemma. However, as La Haine, Les Misérables, and Athena indicate with all their constitutive ambiguity there another, more radical path is possible. One can imagine and act towards another social configuration, albeit in a way that is the inverse of that advocated by the French welfare state since the beginning of its historical construction. What the three films affirm is that traditional social reforms seem to have reached a limit: there is no longer room for everyone to be included in French society, but there is still be a way to fight against it. From the professor’s point of view, there is nostalgia for a disintegrating society. From the police’s perspective, there are only parasites feeding off the social crisis. We conclude by noting that this ambiguity is only present in one of the films analyzed here. In its own way, Branco Sai, Preto Fica also posits the impossibility of reconciliation within Brazilian society. The PCC, the organized crime group in Cidade de Deus, and the police all reinforce the logic of daily crisis and war. There seems to be an element pointing beyond war, however, highlighted by those who are already on the edge of this society in crisis. After all, for them, the war has been about elimination. This explosive force, however, is highly ambiguous. It could not be otherwise.

REFERENCES

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• ARANTES, Paulo Eduardo. 2014. O novo tempo do mundo: e outros escritos sobre a era de emergência São Paulo: Boitempo .
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• ARANTES, Paulo Eduardo. 2023. A fratura brasileira do mundo: visões do laboratório brasileiro da mundialização São Paulo: Editora 34.
• ARANTES, Paulo Eduardo, and LYRA DE CARVALHO, Frederico. 2021. “Entrevista: Paulo Arantes. O outro sentido. Uma teoria crítica na periferia do capitalismo”. Revista Passages de Paris: (21): 261-275.
• ASTARIAN, Bruno, and FERRO, Robert. 2019. Le ménage à trois de la lutte des classe: classe moyenne salariée, prolétariat et capital Toulouse: L'Asymétrie.
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• BOUTAUD, Anne-Sophie. 2025. “Du Brésil à l’Europe, les nouvelles routes de la cocaine”. CNRS Le journal, December 1. https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/du-bresil-a-leurope-les-nouvelles-routes-de-la-cocaine
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• BRITO, Felipe, and OLIVEIRA, Pedro Rocha (orgs.). 2013. Até o último homem: visões cariocas da administração armada da vida social São Paulo: Boitempo .
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• CANETTIERI, Thiago. 2023. “Ordem, progresso e catástrofe: sobre a pertinência do ensaio ‘A fratura brasileira do mundo’, de Paulo Eduardo Arantes”. Passagens de Paris, (22-23): 57-79.
• CANETTIERI, Thiago. 2024. Brasil-Catástrofe: constelações da destruição que estamos vivendo Rio de Janeiro: Consequência Editora .
• CANETTIERI, Thiago. Forthcoming. “Teses sobre os sentidos da Guerra: leituras a partir de Paulo Arantes”. Revista Prometeica
• COSTA, Maria Helena. 2009. “Espaços de subjetividade e transgressão nas paisagens fílmicas”. Pro-Posições, 20(3): 109-120.
• DUNKER, Christian. 2015. Mal-estar, sofrimento e sintoma. Uma psicopatologia do Brasil entre muros São Paulo: Boitempo .
• ENZENSBERGER, Hans Magnus. 1995. Guerra civil São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
• FELTRAN, Gabriel. 2014. “O valor dos pobres: a aposta no dinheiro como mediação para o conflito social contemporâneo”. Cadernos CRH, 27(72): 495-512.
• FELTRAN, Gabriel. 2018. Irmãos: uma história do PCC São Paulo: Companhia das Letras .
• FELTRAN, Gabriel. 2019. “Economias (i)lícitas no Brasil: uma perspectiva etnográfica”. Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 1(2):1-8.
• FOURQUET, Jérôme. 2019. L’Archipel français: une nation multiple et divisée Paris: Seuil.
• GRAHAM, Stephen. 2016. Cidades sitiadas: o novo urbanismo militar São Paulo: Boitempo .
• GUILLUY, Christophe. 2014. La France periphérique. Comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires Paris: Flammarion.
• GUILLUY, Christophe. 2019. No society. La fin de la classe moyenne occidentale Paris: Flammarion .
• HARTOG, François. 2012. Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps Paris: Seuil .
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• KOKOREFF, Michel, and LAPEYRONNIE, Didier. 2013. Refair la cité, l’avenir des banlieues Paris: Seuil .
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• KURZ, Robert. 2014. Dinheiro sem valor: linhas gerais para uma transformação da crítica da economia política Lisboa: Antígona.
• LYRA DE CARVALHO, Frederico. 2023. “De um lado como do outro. Paulo Arantes: guerra, fronteiras e o fim da história”. Constelaciones: Revista de Teoria Crítica, (15): 186-204.
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• TELLES, Vera. 2011. A cidade nas fronteiras do legal e do ilegal Belo Horizonte: Editora Fino Traço
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• 1
  Bac is an acronym for “brigade anticriminalité,” a detachment of the French national police that operates through interventions, as stated euphemistically on the organization’s website,in “zones urbaines, particulièrement en milieux sensibles,” that is, in urban peripheries.
• 2
  Unless one holds to increasingly obsolete understandings of war and takes the position shown by Officer Herc on a T.V. show (The Wire) about a similar situation in another country on another continent: “You can’t call this a war. Wars end.”
• 3
  Here we take into account what Costa (2009: 110) writes about the role of film analysis as a way of interpreting reality itself: cinema has become increasingly explored and valued as an analytical tool in contemporary times. Cinematic representation has become the focus of and support for the analysis of cultural groups and the daily lives of individuals participating in these groups in urban spaces. The cinema has become a primary source for understanding said groups’ ways and coherence, as well as the meanings through which experiences, behaviors, identities, subjectivities, and sociocultural practices have been constituted, understood, and reworked spatially and subjectively.
• 4
  In other words, studying the other side of the coin — that is, the elites of both countries through contemporary cinema — might be a way to continue this work.
• 5
  Regarding the various notions of war in the philosophy of Paulo Arantes, see Canettieri (forthcoming), Theses on the Meanings of War: Readings from Paulo Arantes.
• 6
  For a description of this critical procedure, see Slavoj Žižek (2018).
• 7
  It is interesting to note that in his typology, Christophe Guilluy (2014) considers that banlieues differ from peripheries. Peripheries are understood as the deindustrialized and increasingly underserved and socially unstructured zones scattered throughout the country, while what we know as peripheries in Brazil (that is, the peri-urban and precarious areas) are understood as the banlieues. For an analysis of Guilluy’s theses, mediated by the theses of Paulo Arantes, see Lyra de Carvalho (2025).
• 8
  Nascimento is played by Wagner Moura, recent winner of the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe for his work in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film The Secret Agent. Because of his role in Elite Squad, Moura’s was associated with police authoritarianism for many years.
• 9
  The French suburbs stand out from the rest of the country because of the “concentration effects” that occur there. In 2016, 4.8 million people lived in the 1,300 neighborhoods understood as “priority” by urban policy makers. The population of these neighborhoods (which are more restricted than in the past) is more affected by poverty than the rest of the French population. 42% of the inhabitants of these neighborhoods live below the poverty line (in the greater urban units that encompass these neighborhoods, this is the case for only 12% of the population), with a median income level 35% lower than the French average. In comparison with the greater urban units that encompass these neighborhoods, the inhabitants are also younger (6% more are “under 15 years old”). These neighborhoods have a higher proportion of immigrants (11% more) and more single-parent families (7% more). The residents of these neighborhoods have greater difficulties entering the labor market: their unemployment rate is three times higher than the national average. Furthermore, one in five employed people from these neighborhoods has a precarious labor contract and 58% of women are unemployed (that is, 17% more than in the surrounding areas. (Canettieri 2023: 70-71).
• 10
  Gabriel Feltran (2019) discusses how “the monetary economy connects legal and illegal markets.” He uses ethnographic cases to show how these economies, linking illicit practices and legitimate markets through the circulation of money. These markets are international in scale.
• 11
  See Vera Telles (2009, 2011).
• 12
  These young people without a future, on the other hand, do hope (Arantes 2014). This is an “unproductive” hope in the historical sense, however, since their lives constantly re-establish pre-existing conditions. Above all, it is a hope set in a context of violence where subjects have no agency. This is reminiscent of what Minkowski described in soldiers returning from the front in the First World War. Under these conditions an objective retreat and disengagement from the world takes place, which reproduces violence.
• 13
  Regarding this subject, see the work of François Hartog (2012).
• 14
  It is worth remembering, as Luana Motta points out (2021: 17), that “the state management of urban conflict among impoverished populations and territories has been carried out along a continuum ranging from welfare policies to repressive policies, all conceived and implemented as a way of preventing, combating, and/or managing violence.” Based on her ethnography conducted in the Cidade de Deus favela in Rio de Janeiro, the author reflects upon modes of governance and ordering of precarious populations. Luana encounters what she calls “the social projects of police-teachers.” As she explains, these are low-ranking police officers from simple families who teachguitar, English, karate, jiu-jitsu, and capoeira at the CRJ and the UPP in the community. They provided this service, the author emphasizes, “entirely voluntarily, without any contract, allowance, or remuneration” (2021: 45). Despite the fact that “there is no regulation regarding the projects,” Luana recounts they were listed on the public security policy website (www.upprj.com). She notes that the intervention of these police-teachers produces a selectivity, separating the “problem youth” from the “exemplary youth”. The author includes statements from the police-teachers themselves indicating that when a given young person is involved in crime, what they deserve is violent repression: after all, crime “is in their blood” or “they’re a bandit and a bum.” The exemplary youth, one who deserves the social project, is considered to be a “young person who works but without education, who survives doing odd jobs,” or one who “works and studies,” thus forming the target audience for this type of action. These young people are called “project youths”. According to Motta: “Inserted into this logic [of the PMERJ military institution] and performing this dual and combined function — police officer and teacher in the project — police-teachers classify young people based on the two main forms of intervention they must implement: prevention or social intervention on the one hand; combat and repression on the other. In this logic, the different profiles of young people demand different types of action, repression or social intervention. Police actions vary in terms of intensity or may be combined, all depending on the profile of the young person in question” (2021: 86).
• 15
  Valeria looks at this pair also accompanies the (re)formation of the periphery in Brazil, as demonstrated by Feltran (2014).
• 16
  Today the PCC has expanded throughout the country and the planet, becoming one of the main players in the international drug market (Boutaud 2025).
• 17
  As we have argued, the films’ manifest ideological character are not mere reflections of a pre-existing peripheral condition. There is a back-and-forth between reality and cultural production that will be explored in greater depth in a possible future work which will analyze the inverse process in these two societies in which “reality” itself begins to emulate the logic of the spectacle of cultural productions, such as the films analyzed here. This process is blatant in the peripheries — and perhaps in contemporary life and society more broadly. The framing of the violence of daily life in the Brazilian and French peripheries, as we have seen in the films, se ems to find a disturbing echo in the way real conflicts unfold. The films thus not only inform us about the current moment of the peripheral condition by mirroring or portraying reality, but also because reality itself has become spectacularized in an extreme way. From this perspective, there are strong indications (that should be investigated in detail) that, increasingly, “life imitates art”.
• Data Availability Statement
  The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself

Edited by

• Dossier Editors
  Adriana Facina
  Programa de Pós-graduação em Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
  http://[e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9381-5134
  Silvia Capanema
  Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, pesquisadora de Pléaide/Campus Condorcet, pesquisadora bolsista CNRS CREDA-IHEAL (2024-2025)
  [e-mail] | https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1607-2055

Data availability

The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in the article itself

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  20 July 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  03 June 2025
• Accepted
  05 Feb 2026