On Friday 25 January, the Frontline Club hosted it’s first live film screening – interactive web-documentary, Alma, a Tale of Violence by Isabelle Fougère and Miquel Dewever-Plana. Joined by award-winning e-producer Alexandre Brachet and moderated by Himesh Kar from WorldView, the audience took part in a unique viewing, following the ‘route’ of the story as chosen by Brachet.
On the main screen we watched Alma’s confessions of violence and murder as a member of one of the most violent maras (gangs) in Guatemala. Throughout her confession, pictures and illustrations were brought into view – controlled by Brachet on his iPad. He chose certain moments to drag in the background pictures and illustrations as Alma continued her tale, adding another narrative to her story.
This interaction allows the viewer to control their experience of the film, giving them the opportunity to react to the story and select the scenes and shots in a reflection of their emotions.
“You give them a choice,” said Kar, “on how to engage with the material. It is such harrowing and hard stuff to watch at times, you do offer that choice if do you want to engage with Alma or would you rather look at visuals and just take a breather from what your digesting. You don’t get to do that with a conventional documentary.”
Brachet went on to explain how he intended the documentary to work:
“Technically it is two movies running at exactly the same time and it is up to you to decide to stay with the confession or to escape, you will never know what you will find if you escape, sometimes it is quiet, sometimes not.”
One audience member commented that taking the interactive element aside you were left with the powerful voice of Alma intercut with the most brutal images of the gang’s chaotic world. When asked how closely linked these images were to Alma’s story, Brachet said:
“Sometimes on the screen you have friends of Alma, sometimes you have Alma . . . and sometimes [you have] absolutely no connection in terms of family but still very close. [It was] the next neighbourhood, another gang – so it is always the truth.”
Alma’s confession is presented in a linear narrative that leads the audience to finding out that Alma is now a paraplegic after she was shot by her gang. When asked if the confession happened organically or if it was directed Brachet said:
“Miquel and Isabelle knew Alma for a long time. . . . They met many many times without recording. Alma told [her] story many times, so of course when we met with a camera we knew her story, obviously we directed her to [tell us] what we are interested to tell you [about] and make [it] exactly want we want.”
Brachet worked with photographer Miquel Dewever-Plana and writer Isabelle Fougère to bring together Alma’s story. The iPad app is just a small part of story that also includes an interactive web documentary, two books and a film. You can find out more about Alma’s tale or watch her confession yourself here.
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The killing of documentary maker Christian Poveda represents a sad loss for a region much in need of greater understanding.
The first, last and only time that I met the French-born filmmaker and photographer Christian Poveda was on 1 April of this year, when I interviewed him in an apartment he was renting in Mexico City while doing promotion for his film, La Vida Loca.
I’d seen the documentary the night before at a screening attended by Poveda, who fielded questions on why he chose to spend 16 months following members of El Salvador’s notoriously violent 18th Street gang with a video camera. It is a film that could well have brought him to his violent end.
Poveda was shot dead on Wednesday 4 September just outside San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, where he lived. Sources say that the night before he was killed, Poveda confessed to being afraid and worried that the gangs were taking a turn for the worse, with a new crop of ever-more vicious leaders coming to the fore.
La Vida Loca is a groundbreaking documentary that shines a light onto the bleak lives of El Salvador’s Mara gangs. Poveda achieved unprecedented, long-term access to certain branches of the gangs and their daily lives in the capital.
I’m not one to speculate on who might be responsible for his death — the disorder, impunity and lawlessness in El Salvador means we might never know. But his murder is a terrible loss, not only to his friends, family and colleagues, but to the journalistic community in Latin America, which already suffers some of the highest rates of aggression and intimidation against members of the trade.
To Poveda, the young people who join las Maras were “victims of society”. He approached the gangs as a documentary filmmaker with an open mind and a lack of moral judgment.
As he said to me during our interview, he was of the opinion that “the majority are young boys that were abandoned at a very young age, and the fact that someone would come from another continent to spend time with them on a daily basis, filming and listening to them, for them that was something very important, that someone was paying attention.”
Many would disagree with Poveda’s assessment of the gangs that stretch across Central America to the United States. Poveda worked as a photojournalist in El Salvador during and after the 12-year-long civil war, which began in 1980. But the gangs really took on their current strength and size in the United States.
Gangs were formed by Salvadorans living on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s, many of who went to the US to escape the civil war ravaging El Salvador. When the peace accords that ended the war were signed in El Salvador in the early 1990s, huge numbers of gang members returned to the country, some of them by choice but most of them through deportation by US authorities. Many were sent back after completing prison sentences.
Although gangs did exist on a small scale in El Salvador before the mass return of migrants from the US, they only grew into the super-gangs they are today after the end of the civil war. The brutally violent groups have been connected with organized crime and other illegal activities across the Americas.
But however you view the gangs, Poveda did what good journalists do — he broadened the discussion, taking a new visual and journalistic angle on an issue that has become so black and white. As the United States continues to sweep the issue of immigration reform under the carpet and turn a blind eye to the repercussions of some of its policies on its smaller, poorer, weaker neighbours, Poveda put some of those realities up on cinema screens on both sides of the Atlantic for all to see.
Tragically, he paid the highest price for doing so.
La Vida Loca, which has been showing on the international film festival circuit, is coming up for commercial release in Mexico and France over the next two months. But the day after Poveda’s death, his producer Gustavo Angel was still trying to negotiate a US release for the film.
I can’t help feeling that if La Vida Loca isn’t seen by audiences within the United States, many of whom have never traveled south of the border, let alone as far south as Central America, we will miss an opportunity to advance the discussion surrounding America’s gang and immigration problems — issues that are inextricably linked.
Deborah Bonello is a blogger and video journalist MexicoReporter.com
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