When Cidade de Deus (City of God ) proved a big hit at the 2002 Cannes film festival and then broke box office records on the international circuit nobody was more surprised than Fernando Meirelles, its modest director. “Fernando was convinced no one would want to see it. He thought they wouldn’t like all the violence,” says Hank Levine, a co-producer on Cidade de Deus and a colleague at o2, the São Paulo-based independent production company.

The result – to Mr Levine’s chagrin – was that the deals o2 negotiated with distributors were far less attractive than they could have been. Even so, the success of Cidade de Deus – which follows the fortunes of two drugs gangs in a Rio de Janeiro slum – has put Brazilian cinema on the international map and in the process drawn an attention to an industry whose fortunes have been transformed over the past 15 years.