Summary
Children of the Church Steps is a powerful and frustrating depiction of tragedy through the eyes of children.
Children of the Church Steps burns frustration for fuel. The four-part Netflix series is backdropped by the Candelaria massacre, a heinous event that took place on July 23, 1993, outside the Candelaria church in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Eight homeless people, six of them minors, were killed by a group that included several police officers. The inevitability of this tragedy gives Luis Lomenha’s series its dramatic weight. You know its central characters, all children, are doomed. The frustration is in how powerless they were – and how powerless we feel by extension – to stop it.
Everything about the series is designed to exacerbate this feeling. The church itself was built by the descendants of African slaves brought to Brazil over four centuries of European colonization, but this detail is omitted by the tour guides who show it off to tourists. The plot is structured such that each episode is devoted to one of four children, contextualizing how they all made their separate journeys to the steps of the church. Their circumstances are inescapable. You can feel the tragedy coming.
Fact and fiction are combined. The massacre was, of course, real, though its origins are clouded here. People lobbing stones at police cars was a documented inciting incident, but the raid on a candy factory planned and executed by the main kids is a dramatized embellishment. It’s the same with the kids – Douglas, Seven, Popcorn, and Jesus – who’re cobbled together from artistic license and real testimonials. You can’t tell where the truth ends and the drama begins, which is partly the point.
Not that it matters anyway. This isn’t a documentary, which is why it so determinedly forgoes the wider context of the church’s function in Rio and the sociopolitical crosswinds that led to the massacre and instead frames the whole thing in the narrow but wide-eyed perspective of children. Their plights are universal. A young kid who just wants to give his father a respectable burial; another coming to terms with his sexuality; another losing her innocence on the streets. Can these stories truly be considered fictional, even if they didn’t necessarily happen here, at this time?
Children of the Church Steps suffers, I think, for only running four episodes, all under an hour. I say that as someone who complains about the bloated length of most Netflix shows for a living. But the series is bookended by simple text explaining the context surrounding the massacre and then, briefly, what happened after it, but it would have been nice to see both of these things in dramatic form, through the lens of the characters.
People often think that using animals or children for dramatic purposes is cheating. And I can understand that. I will concede to feeling more strongly invested in the fates of these characters simply because they’re young, but I prefer not to frame that as a storytelling conceit. It’s more like basic empathy, an evolutionary instinct. This is why, I think, I don’t mind that there isn’t a documentarian approach to rationalizing the massacre or exploring “both sides”. I don’t need it. I’m on the side of the dead children every time.
It almost feels like a strange disservice to judge this series in terms of “objective” metrics, like the quality of the acting (good!) or the structure of a plot (also good!) that leads, inexorably, to a tragic and avoidable massacre. So, I won’t. This isn’t that kind of story anyway. It isn’t one you pick apart and analyze. It’s one you feel.
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