Meirelles has spoken about Scorsese while describing how the film was cut, and the borrowed grammar is easy to list: a narrator who was there and survived, a freeze frame that stops to introduce somebody, chapter titles, a decade crossed in a montage, and a child's admiration for men who will not live long. What City of God adds is that its narrator never joins: Rocket wants a camera, not a gun, and that is the film's exit from the form it borrowed.