Leo and Ze

Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Angus Macqueen, gained extraordinary access to the drug gangs in Rio, Brazil to make Leo and Ze, an unsettling story of violence, poverty and wasted lives. Ze, a former gang leader who has managed to get out and survive, tries to help his nephew, Leo, to do the same.

Through the lives of this family, a picture emerges of the way in which the gangs, financed by cocaine sales, have taken over the favela. These are adolescent boys who rule by terror. The normal inhabitants can do nothing in the face of the guns bought on the proceeds of ‘the white stuff.’