The Circuit

by Bob Flynn
Pinning the audience to their seats at its world premiere in San Sebastian, Christian Poveda’s documentary about Salvadorian street gangs, “La Vida Loca,” comes at you like a gun shot in a dark alley.

It’s a willfully ironic title for a film in which, director Poveda acknowledges, “death is the star.” 

Filmed over 18 months amongst the “Mara,” violent youth gangs - modeled on their L.A. counterparts - in the Campanera district of Soyapango in El Salvador, veteran war photographer and documentarist Poveda records, in alarming detail, the lives and sudden deaths of a "clique" of the Mara La 18 . "The 18" are one of two vast rival gangs, with an estimated 17,000 members throughout El Salvador, a country ravaged by decades of brutal dictatorships, covert international interventions and civil war.

“I arrived in El Salvador as a news cameraman and shot my first documentary there in 1981,“ says Poveda, who went on to film 16 docs in strife-torn regions around the world.

“But in 2004, I returned to El Salvador to report on the Maras for Paris Match and did a series of portraits of the members of two enemy gangs. From that came La Vida Loca.”

Poveda (pictured left) found the country’s history of violence had left thousands orphaned, a lost generation whose only 'family' are the gangs, their only social structure the strict codes of honor, ritual, and ranking by facial tattoos akin to ancient tribal markings.

The '18' tattoo which virtually covers the face of a female gang member, is one of the most striking visual images at this year’s San Sebastian.

“We see cruelty and depravation, but its not intended to be sensationalistic,“ says Poveda,

“‘La Vida Loca’ is what life is really about over there. I want the audience to live with the youths and share their experience; understand how the world condemns them, and their need for a context in which to exist.”

Gunshots and funerals punctuate individual tales of gang members, all in their teens or twenties, who accept early death as a given. By the end of the film, seven of the main characters have been gunned down in the street, their bodies collected with casual indifference by local police.

“This film is really about absolute human solitude,“ states Poveda. “Daily contact with the gangs helped us understand how marginalized these young people are.”

Filming under the most dangerous conditions, Povenda is never patronizing nor judgmental and his ferocious slice of reality is undoubtedly a bruising experience but illuminates the extreme edge of an uneasily topical subject.

“El Salvador became a universal example for modern civil war,” says Poveda. “Now the phenomenon of gangs running riot in the country embodies the elements of what is becoming a global problem.”