The streets of Brazil

"When you live in a favela, you live so close to each other that you end up sharing everything, the problems, the happiness," says the 33-year-old actor and director, who grew up in Vidigal and can't imagine living or working elsewhere. "And this movie shows what that is all about, that solidarity, that community feeling."

The movie in question, "Favela Times Five: Now by Themselves," is a group effort by Bezerra and four other young filmmakers, each telling a different story about life in favelas, which are often more euphemistically called morros (hills). A contemporary sequel to the landmark 1962 film "Favela Times Five" (Cinco vezes Favela), the new film is one of several cultural projects created by a growing number of home-grown, favela-based filmmaking collectives, theater companies and small animation studios that are looking to foster local talent and present a more nuanced picture of these fecund communities that are commonly stereotyped as crime-ridden urban jungles ruled by vicious drug lords. In fact, most favelados, as residents are called, are simply poor, working-class people who can't afford to live anywhere else.

Some of these new grass-roots cultural venues are drawing attention from Hollywood, Brazil's Globo media conglomerate and the Venice Biennale. And there are scattered signs that, once in a while, these groups' artistic projects may be motivating Brazilian authorities to pay more attention to the many needs and problems of favelados.

Among the most conspicuous groups is Nós do Morro (We From the Hill), an actors studio that has blossomed into a bustling, one-stop performing arts community center for Vidigal. Founded by actor Guti Fraga, who says his "head got filled with ideas" while living in New York and attending lots of off-Broadway theater, Nós do Morro now receives 900 applicants a year for 100 openings in classes that include acting, film production and capoeira, the spectacular Brazilian martial-arts-dance game.

A number of its young performers have been cast in music videos, soap operas and movies, including Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's "City of God" (Cidade de Deus), a 2002 documentary-like drama about youth gangs in a massive Rio housing project that morphed into a virtual combat zone in the 1980s. Based on a novel by Paulo Lins, the film exposed many non-Brazilians to the shantytowns for the first time, and many artists credit "City of God" and its subsequent, acclaimed TV spinoff "City of Men" (Cidade dos Homens), with drawing Brazil's, and the world's, attention to a culture clash that many had preferred to ignore.

"Fernando Meirelles did us an immense favor when he says it's possible to treat our problems in the cinema," says Bezerra, who has been associated with Nós do Morro since she was 17. Historically, she continues, Brazilians "went to the movies to have a laugh." Now, more of them are realizing that popular culture can provide a challenging as well as entertaining way to scrutinize their society.