Cenoura is coming home. Matheus Nachtergaele returns to the dealer he played in Fernando Meirelles’s City of God for the second season of City of God: The Fight Rages On, the Brazilian crime drama HBO Max carries as an HBO Original. In HBO’s synopsis, Cenoura walks back into the community after his release from detention and finds its drug lord, Curió, dead, with two men fighting over what he left behind.

Titled Cidade de Deus: A Luta Não Para in Brazil, the series picks up the film’s story two decades on, through Buscapé, the photographer Alexandre Rodrigues played for Meirelles and plays again here. O2 Filmes produces, with Meirelles and Andrea Barata Ribeiro as lead producers, and Aly Muritiba is the overall director. The synopsis HBO has released for the new season does not restart the story. It starts from the vacancy Curió’s death leaves at the top of the neighbourhood.

A drug lord’s empty chair

HBO’s account of the new episodes starts with a death. Curió, the trafficker who ran Cidade de Deus, is gone, and a war for control breaks out between Geninho, his heir, played by Victor Andrade, and Matarrindo, Curió’s right-hand man. A succession fight is one of the oldest engines in crime drama, and it gives a returning season a clean starting line: the question is no longer who rises in the favela, but who inherits it, and what an inheritance is worth when the people holding the guns keep changing.

The structural decision that stands out in what HBO has released is the return of Cenoura. Dropping a character from the film into a season about succession sets two generations of the same streets side by side. Cenoura belongs to the era Meirelles filmed; Geninho and Matarrindo belong to the one the series built. The premise points to a man walking back into a map he no longer recognises, and the casting, which threads the film’s actors through a large new ensemble, suggests the writers want the audience to feel that gap too.

Berenice takes a council seat

The second line of the season moves the story out of the alleys and into city hall. Berenice, played by Roberta Rodrigues, who also played her in the film, is now a newly elected city councilwoman, and HBO says she takes on political corruption and militia groups. That shift changes the shape of the conflict. A council seat puts someone from the community inside the institution that is supposed to answer for what happens on its corners, and the synopsis sets her against the militias rather than against the traffickers.

Jerusa, the lawyer played by Andréia Horta, carries the third line. HBO describes her as haunted by a dark past and set on vengeance against the people who destroyed her family. Leka, played by Luellem de Castro, carries the fourth: she turns to funk, culture and the community’s bailes to open up opportunities in the neighbourhood. The press material gives that thread the same space as the gang war, a telling choice for a property known abroad mostly for its gunfire.

The map behind the fiction

The militias in Berenice’s storyline are not a television invention. In Greater Rio, militias are armed groups that control territory and, according to the researchers who track them, run irregular transport and clandestine gas, cable television and security services. The Mapa dos Grupos Armados, built by the Instituto Fogo Cruzado and the Geni research group at Fluminense Federal University, measured the area under militia influence growing by 387 per cent over 16 years, from 52.6 to 256.28 square kilometres. By 2021, militias held 49.9 per cent of the areas controlled by any armed group in the metropolitan region, and 90.3 per cent of their growth had come in places no faction had controlled before.

That is the shift the season’s synopsis points at. The film was built around traffickers and police. By its second season, the series has added the third armed power that, in the real city, has been spreading into the ground between them.

Who is making it

Muritiba, whose Private Desert was Brazil’s submission to the Academy Awards, returns as overall director, with Bruno Costa directing episodes and Thatiane Almeida as episode co-director. The writers’ room is led by Maíra Oliveira and Paulo Lins, the author of the novel the original film adapted, with Patrícia Andrade supervising the screenplay. Lins in the room keeps a straight line from the book to the series: the writer who first put these streets on the page is still deciding what happens on them.

The returning cast also includes Sabrina Rosa, Kiko Marques, Dhonata Augusto, Carol Dall Farra, Rafael Lozano, Shirley Cruz and Otavio Linhares, and the new episodes were shot in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

The series is still built around Buscapé, a photographer. In a season where an heir, a right-hand man, the militias and a councilwoman all reach for the same streets, the series has set up a question it is not built to settle: what a photograph, a council vote or a baile can change in a place where armed men decide who holds the corner.

What viewers are asking

Is it a sequel to the film? Yes. The series continues the story of Meirelles’s film, itself adapted from Paulo Lins’s novel, and follows its characters twenty years on.

Who comes back from the film? Alexandre Rodrigues as Buscapé and Roberta Rodrigues as Berenice, joined this season by Matheus Nachtergaele as Cenoura.

Do I need to watch the first season? HBO’s synopsis picks up from where the first season left the community, with Curió dead and Berenice elected to the council, so the first season is the natural place to begin.

Where can I watch it? On HBO Max, and in Brazil also on the HBO channel.

Release details

The second season of City of God: The Fight Rages On premieres on Sunday, November 8, 2026, on HBO Max and on the HBO channel, where it airs at 10 p.m. in Brazil. Its six episodes roll out weekly on Sundays, with the finale scheduled for December 13. The six episodes of the first season, released in 2024, are available on HBO Max.