In 2016 Fernando Meirelles was one of the co-directors (along with Daniela Thomas [Linha de Passe 2008, Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land 1996, O Primeiro Dia/Midnight 1998 all co-directed with Salles] and Andrucha Waddington [Eu Tu Eles/Me You them 2000, Casa de Areia/House of Sand 2005]) of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Rio's Maracana Stadium. This is the third time in the recent history of the Olympics that a film director (or in the case of Brazil a team of filmmakers) has been charged with producing a positive image of the nation for global consumption (an estimated audience of three billion). In Beijing in 2008 it was Yimou Zhang (House of the Flying Daggers 2004, Hero 2002, Raise the Red Lantern 1991). In London in 2012 it was Danny Boyle (Trainspotting 2 2017, Trance 2013, 127 Hours 2010, Slumdog Millionaire 2008, Trainspotting 1996). Some commentators have suggested that Meirelles was an ‘unexpected choice’ to (co)direct the Games’ opening ceremony given his ‘grim depiction of Rio's crime riddled favelas’ in Cidade de Deus (2002) (Locke 2016) while others have problematically suggested his suitability for the job given his ‘proven track record [in Cidade de Deus] of looking at ugly subject matter and rendering it elegantly’ (Acevedo-Muñoz cited in Locke 2016).

That Meirelles’ representation of Brazil in his first international success Cidade de Deus (co-directed with Katia Lund) should still figure in contemporary Olympics-related references to him, almost fifteen years after the film's release, suggests the ‘heated public debates’ the film's ‘alleged stereotyping of poverty and violence’ ignited about how to represent Brazil to the world are still ongoing (Andermann and Bravo 2013: 6). In recent years these debates have expanded to incorporate films which deal with similar subject matter: José Padilha's exploration of the drug war in Rio's favelas told from the perspective of a special police unit Tropa de Elite (2007) and Tropa de Elite 2: O Enimigo Agora e Outro (2011) (Bentes 2013). Brazilian critic Ivana Bentes has directed this criticism in particular at Meirelles and Padilha's use of the heightened aesthetics of the ‘Hollywood style action [and other genre] film[s]’ and the ideological complicity with a conservative worldview that supposedly goes with these Hollywood borrowings: reducing, this criticism suggests, the lives of Brazil's comunidades (the term residents prefer over favelas) to ‘easily accessible [Hollywood] action codes’ (Bentes 2013: 104, 111).