Every now and again, a story finds you. For me, one of the most moving stories that found me during my time in Mexico was that about people from Central American who cross Mexico on their way to the United States as undocumented migrants. It was something I reported on frequently, and when Marc Silver, a British filmmaker, came to Mexico City looking to make a series of films about the issue for Amnesty International, I was thrilled he planned to focus on the issue.

Marc had Gael Garcia Bernal on board as his presenter, and has produced some excellent advocacy work. “Los Invisibles” (the invisibles) series is beautifully produced and shot, giving voice to a community rarely asked it’s opinion.

The tone of these videos is not journalistic – Silver and Bernal have a very strong point to make on behalf of Amnesty International. They tell the stories of this group of people excellently. As media budgets diminish, we’re likely to see a lot more of this sort of work fill the information space left.

On how he and Bernal were received when they were making the film, Silver said:

“We were received very warmly. It is not often anybody asks their opinion or story, so people were very keen to share their experiences with us. It seemed to be a very empowering experience for people to talk about the horrors of the journey because it’s almost like these are taboo topics that no-one wants to discuss at home because they don’t want to scare their families, particularly their mothers.”

The films were shot mainly on DSLR using the Canon EOS 7d with a Canon EF 50 mm F1.2L USM lens, and a Canon EF 14 mm F2.8L II USM lens.

Click on the video to see the first of the four films, and that link will also take you to the rest of the series.

Also, do check out another film in the making from Marc called “Who Is Dayani Cristal?”, which is about the quest to identify an anonymous body found in the Arizona desert whose only identifying feature is a tattoo reading ‘Dayani Cristal’. Part drama, part documentary, the film again features Gael García Bernal. See the trailer here.

“Arturo has captured with his camera shocking images which document the massacres, attacks, disappearances and car bombs which have left thousands of victims in a city which has become the battle ground for criminal gangs”, says Manuel Carrillo, Senior Producer at Reuters Television in Mexico, who nominated Arturo for the Prize.

“Despite threats and intimidation from these gangs and even from the security forces, Arturo has remained strong and unfailing in his coverage – mindful of the fact that in Mexico, other journalists have been killed just for fulfilling their duty to keep society informed”.

The recognition of Arturo is a nod to all of the journalists who work up on the Mexican border, covering the violent flashpoints of the ongoing conflicts between Mexico’s drug cartels and government. Violence against journalists in Mexico was a theme that I found difficult to escape on MexicoReporter.com, from when I arrived in 2007. Things have only grown worse since then.

It remains incredible to me that many of the local journalists and fixers who foreign correspondents often work with up on the border manage to get up and go to work every morning in a climate as violent, insecure and explosive as the one they live in. Respect to them.

You can see Arturo talking about life on the job in Ciudad Juarez below.

I was delighted to see that some (full disclosure) friends of mine – filmmakers Jennifer Szymaszek and Greg Brosnan - have been nominated for a documentary that we featured more than a year ago, called “In the Shadow of the Raid“.

Here’s what we wrote about the documentary in September last year:

The tone of the documentary is observational rather than preachy, in the same vein as other recent works such as “Los Que Se Quedan / Those Who Remain.” The filmmakers try to reflect some of the realities that contribute to why so many Central Americans and Mexicans head to the United States. But there are no ICE officials interviewed, no legal redresses sought. Brosnan and Szymaszek focus on the people affected by the raid, and the resulting film is a photographic testament to a sad reality.

Good luck to them and all the finalists. Ad if you’re in London, it promises to be a great event.

Back in May 2008, U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials rounded up 389 undocumented workers in the Agriprocessors Inc. kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. The raid was the largest in U.S history.

Two weeks later, filmmakers Jennifer Szymaszek and Greg Brosnan started filming “In the Shadow of the Raid,” a documentary film showing at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico. A 15-minute edit of the film was recently broadcast on PBS “Frontline’s” website.

“In the Shadow of the Raid” delves into the consequences of the ICE raid for Postville and for some of the the migrants who were arrested and deported back to their homes in two rural villages in Guatemala.

Following the closure of the meatpacking plant, Postville businesses failed and livelihoods were destroyed.

In Guatemala, migrant Willian Toj returned to his wife and parents. Awaiting him was a massive debt that he accrued from his trip to the U.S. He had been working in the Postville plant for 20 minutes before the ICE raid.

Toj can barely earn enough to pay the monthly interest on the $7,000 debt, let alone get the funds to treat his mother’s worsening cancer.

The tone of the documentary is observational rather than preachy, in the same vein as other recent works such as “Los Que Se Quedan / Those Who Remain.” The filmmakers try to reflect some of the realities that contribute to why so many Central Americans and Mexicans head to the United States. But there are no ICE officials interviewed, no legal redresses sought. Brosnan and Szymaszek focus on the people affected by the raid, and the resulting film is a photographic testament to a sad reality.

Watch the video for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times.

Video: An interview with Jennifer Szymaszek and Greg Brosnan, directors of “In the Shadow of the Raid.” All non-interview material courtesy of Szymaszek and Brosnan. Video interview by Deborah Bonello.

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

www.MexicoReporter.com

This article was written for Index on Censorship.

Photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda was shot dead in El Salvador Sept. 2, 2009. He spent more than 16 months, every day, with the mara gangs of San Salvador to make the 2009 documentary “La Vida Loca.” This is footage from an interview conducted by the Los Angeles Times’ Deborah Bonello with Poveda a few months before his death. It took place in Mexico City on April 1.

Reuters reports:

Suspected Salvadorean gang members killed French filmmaker Christian Poveda, whose 2008 film “La Vida Loca” crudely depicts the hopeless lives of members of the infamous Mara 18 street gang, local police said on Wednesday.

Poveda, 53, was shot on a road 10 miles north of the capital of San Salvador, as he drove back from filming in La Campanera, a poor, overcrowded suburb and a Mara 18 stronghold.

President Mauricio Funes said in a statement on Wednesday night that he was “shocked” by Poveda’s murder and ordered a thorough investigation.

“La Vida Loca” (The Crazy Life) closely followed the lives of several heavily tattooed gang members, some of whom were jailed or killed during the shooting of the film.

We’ll have more tomorrow, but you can see Poveda talking about his work filming the gangs in an interview I did with him earlier this year.

Mexico’s second annual human rights film festival, supported by a number of organizations here including the Mexico branch of Amnesty International, the Ambulante documentary film project and Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission, opens at the end of the week.

The series of documentary and fiction features, as well as short films, come from 23 countries and will run on screens Aug. 14-20 in two of the city’s Cinepolis cinemas. The cinema chain’s Fundacion Cinepolis is the event organizer.

Unlike last year, this year’s festival will have two competitive sections: best Mexican documentary and best Mexican short.

Mexico has no shortage of human rights issues for documentarians to tackle, and among the fare at this year’s festival are themes such as migration, global warming, freedom of expression, child prostitution and the slayings of women in Ciudad Juarez.

Productions included in the program range from films such as “Los Que Se Quedan” (“Those Who Remain”), “Voces Silenciadas” (“Silenced Voices”) and “Sin Nombre” (“Nameless”), which have already made the film festival rounds, to less prominent documentaries.

Last year’s event attracted fewer than 4,000 visitors, and about 1,000 of those attended an open-air film broadcast in Mexico City’s Zocalo. In a city of more than 20 million people, that’s not a great turnout.

This year, organizers are going to charge 20 pesos per ticket, unlike last year, when screenings were free.

It’s hoped that charging for tickets might encourage more people to come and see the films. Lorena Guille, executive director of Fundacion Cinepolis, said, “There is a cultural perception here that what’s free isn’t of good quality.”

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times.

At first glance, “Los Bastardos” seems a surprising film for a Mexican director to make.

The second movie from Amat Escalante, 30, is a disturbing fictional tale about 24 hours in the lives of two undocumented Mexican day laborers in Los Angeles.

The documentary style of Escalante’s storytelling, which uses two non-actors in the main roles, lulls the viewer into a false sense of complacency that comes to a traumatic and sudden end. The long, lingering shots, taken by a stationary camera, are reminiscent of films such as “Luz Silenciosa / Silent Light” by hot Mexican film talent Carlos Reygadas, who was an associate producer on “Los Bastardos” and also provided Escalante with what he calls “moral support.”

Given the debate raging in the United States over the rights of undocumented migrants, “Los Bastardos” could be accused of playing into the hands of the anti-immigration lobby.

After a day’s hard (illegal) labor, the lead characters Jesús and Fausto break into the house of a white, middle-class woman. OK, she’s too high on crack to really care that much. But why would Escalante _ the son of an American woman and a Mexican man who illegally crossed the border into the U.S. before Escalante was born _ want to portray his undocumented paisanos as violent delinquents?

Escalante said his intention was to provoke thought, not to strengthen stereotypes. The film will be seen on both sides of the U.S. border with Mexico, and promises to challenge the two audiences.

Although anti-immigration activists may feel vindicated by the criminal nature of Jesús and Fausto, many people in the U.S. could be concerned by the way Americans in the film treat day laborers in California. Likewise, Mexican viewers might empathize with the persecution of their countrymen abroad, but bristle at the portrayal of the undocumented Mexicans as ultimately violent thugs.

“What I wanted … is that both sides could be offended, not just one,” said Escalante, who knew since he started making movies in his early 20s that he was going to one day focus on immigration.

“I didn’t want to make a movie [in which] the Mexicans had to be completely good,” he said in near perfect English during an interview in Mexico City. Escalante lived in the U.S from the age of 11 to 18. He now resides in Guanajuato, Mexico.

That none of the characters is completely good or bad is what makes the film much more cynical and complex than it first seems. The bleak social background against which the events of the film roll out paints a depressing picture of the daily lives of at least two Americans, too. The day laborers’ victim Karen (played by Nina Zavarin, a professional actress) can barely have a conversation with her teenage son, and hits the crack pipe in the evening to block out her everyday existence.

Throughout the film the viewer has a mounting sense of dread as they observe the abuse Jesús and Fausto endure from U.S. citizens. But whether their crime is a vengeful act, or one for which they’re being paid by a third party (as Karen suspects, at least from her drug-addled perspective) isn’t really the point. Perhaps the point is that everyone in the movie is a victim in some way.

“The movie is about something that stops working, and collapses, for me. I have the theory that when things are not just, or not equal, or not the way they should be naturally, they will explode and some bad things are going to happen. In the movie this is what I wanted to show,” said Escalante.

He does so very graphically, with a feature film that deserves the recognition it has received from a number of festivals including the Morelia International Film Festival (best feature film) and Cannes (Un certain regard).

Whether you love it or hate it, “Los Bastardos” promises to leave an impression that’s hard to shake.

“Los Bastardos” opened in Mexico cinemas last Friday, and is available on DVD in the United States.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times

Video by Deborah Bonello. All non-interview material courtesy of Mantarraya Productions. With thanks for the Red Tree House for hosting the filming of the interview.

Since then, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Christiane Burkhard, who filmed and directed the documentary, in her Mexico City home. The interview was for the Los Angeles Times, the edited version of which you can see here.

Below is a longer version of the interview with more insights from Burkhard.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City