About São Paulo

São Paulo is the third biggest city in the world, after Tokyo and Mexico City.

17 million inhabitants, 4 million automobiles and 10,000 miles of streets make São Paulo one of the most congested cities in the world.

It has one of the worst crime rates in the world with 1,500 murders last year, compared to New York's 671.

When filmmaker Beto Brant used real people and real slums to make his hit film 'The Trespasser', he couldn't have imagined the film's themes of violence and corruption would directly affect a starring member of his cast. Rapper Sabotage was shot and killed in the early hours of Friday 24th January 2003 after dropping his wife off at work. He was a hero to dwellers in the slums of São Paulo and to Brazilians everywhere. Before the tragedy, Alex met Sabotage and Beto Brant and they talked about the film.

• Beto Brant and Sabotage:
  BETO BRANT: This guy goes to the slum to contract a guy to kill someone and then washes his hands of him, thinking that because he has money, he can buy the guy's silence and buy peace of mind, without comeback.
  
  I think that it's a film which puts a spotlight on a class conflict, right? It's the elite against the slum dwellers.
  
  When you're filming a scene like this, no actor is better than someone who lives in that place. They have that way of talking. They have a street slang and they bring it into the script.

• SABOTAGE: That's reality. It's just how you enter a bar, at night, with a chick... It's everything that happens in the ghetto, in the favela, people's own dialect. So they liked the film, in the favela. Guys like to see people speak like this. They like the character. He was a villain, but they liked to see how this guy talked.

A dark story by a paulista taxi driver