MARTIN Scorsese returns next week with the long-gestating Gangs Of New York, and Quentin Tarantino will be back this year from wherever he has been languishing.

However, the modern gods of guns will have to go some way to match the visceral impact of Fernando Meirelles's blast of Brazilian violent street life.

Here is a Rio de Janeiro where the rhythm of life is not the carnival samba, but the gunfire of the gangs, and the one football in the land of the beautiful game has a bullet shot through it.

Meirelles's stylish yet profound film - his third - is based on real-life events of the 1960s and '70s and he uses residents from the City of God shantytown slums for his young cast for an extra ring of truth. Many of them are performing to camera for the first time after actor workshops, with licence to improvise the dialogue.

The hand-held camerawork - the restless, close-up, kinetic style that has marked the work of the Dogme film-makers and Michael Moore and Nick Bloomfield's investigative journalism - is another powerhouse contribution with the ferocity of documentary exposs.

Meirelles and his rapid, voracious camera race around the battlegrounds of organised crime in Rio's sprawling shantytown of the Cidade de Deus, a Brazilian housing project of the 1960s built with no hot water facilities, no pavements and no hope.

Drugs fuel the street economy and gang pecking order, the racketeering crime syndicates being run by teenage hoodlums who fight for coke-and-dope control of the neighbourhoods in the face of corrupt, ineffectual policing. Meirelles doesn't shy away from shocking reality: the slow-motion, joyful dance of death of the very young L'il Dice, laughing all the way as he fires shot after shot in a motel theft, is chilling indeed.

At its heart, City Of God is a social and political commentary on a gang turf where aspirations run no higher than becoming the teen drug lord. Significantly, there is one exception, the narrator, Rocket, a quiet lad who wants to be a photographer - and even his camera is caught up in the gangland crossfire.

Updated: 10:03 Friday, January 03, 2003