YouTube phenom KondZilla broke barriers for marginalized communities in São Paulo by bringing the lifestyle, music and aesthetics of Brazilian funk to a worldwide audience, giving visibility to a community that has been historically invisible in popular culture. Dantas’ insistence on being the starmaker, rather than the star, has largely kept him off the global radar — even though KondZilla productions made up half of YouTube’s top 10 music videos in Brazil last year. But now that funk music and the favela perspective have practically become mainstream in Brazil, Dantas is trying to turn KondZilla into a multimedia empire. He’s the creator-director of Sintonia, a drama about three friends from São Paulo’s favelas navigating a world of drug gangs and music, which debuted on Netflix in 2019 and is now in its second season.