If you’re a child of the Brazilian slums in the 1960s, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you’ve been dealt a pretty lousy hand. Growing up you can look forward to such unpleasantness as abject poverty, filth, social immobility, filth, endemic violence, police brutality, filth, and uncleanliness. If, however, you’re of a mind to transcend the lowly status into which you were thrust, your best bet is that great equalizer, that forge of infamy, that last refuge of the desperate and first port of call for the avaricious, I’m talking, of course, about crime. That’s right, kids, if someone has something you want the quickest way to get it is to insert a gun into the face of its soon-to-be previous owner and take it. That, at least, is the route taken by many of those around Rocket, a young lad living in the titular favelas of City of God