With a keen eye for poverty, despair and the tortured state of mind they can engender, Brazilian film director Fernando Meirelles offers the world masterfully crafted tales about the darker side of globalization.
"I live in a developing country. I see the world and everything from a different perspective," he said in an interview Wednesday.
Meirelles was catapulted onto the world stage in 2003, after the release of "City of God," his award-winning portrayal of poverty, drugs and crime in the slums of Rio de Janeiro . He said he was surprised by the reaction to the low-budget film, which featured friends and extras recruited from the slums where he was filming.
"They were unknown actors; there was no good-looking boy, no sex scenes, no romance. Even the violence was not as gory or graphic as in big action films here," he said.
Meirelles, 49, was in town this week for a screening of his latest film, "The Constant Gardener," based on a book of the same name by British author John le Carre . The screening was sponsored by Amnesty International and Oxfam, and was followed by a question-and-answer session.
The film is about a British diplomat's tortuous journey to Nairobi, Berlin, London and Sudan to uncover the truth about the death of his wife, who is killed just as she is about to expose the world's largest pharmaceutical firms for testing a tuberculosis drug that is killing unsuspecting African patients.
"Disposable drugs for disposable people," a doctor tells the forlorn diplomat. "Pharmaceuticals are up there with the arms dealers."
Meirelles was drawn to the story because of the much-publicized real-life conflict between multinational drug companies and Third World countries trying to produce their own generic versions of AIDS medications.
Before making the film, which opens Aug. 26, Meirelles had started working on "Intolerance," a movie about globalization set in seven countries and involving six characters: a 16-year-old Brazilian genius, a Kenyan runner, a Chinese worker, a Filipino terrorist, an American educator and a young woman from the United Arab Emirates.
He was offered the chance to direct "The Constant Gardener," an independent British production with American funding, during a stop in London on his way to Brazil from Kenya.
Born and raised in Sao Paolo, Meirelles traveled extensively in the United States, Asia and other regions while his father, a prominent gastroenterologist, studied abroad, presented papers or took his family on vacations.
When Meirelles was 12, he received a Super-8 camera for a gift and began exploring techniques and tricks to play with perceptions of reality "just for fun." He would film his friends as they jumped, capturing them mid-leap, and then would choose a sequence of frames for his edited footage that made them look like as if were walking on air.
