"The criminal violence in El Salvador is an endemic problem which society perhaps got use to without even notice it. Christian Poveda, a French-Spanish photographer and documentary maker went down for more than a year to the heart of the underworld where it frightens you and he saw madness.

La Vida Loca is a particularly heartbreaking testimony about the street gangs known as ‘maras" in Central America. They symbolize what is today a convulsed land of "lakes and volcanoes"."

CONTRAPUNTO
Juan José Dalton

"La Vida Loca, the film about Latin street gangs rocks Europa.

European audiences had never seen so close how a Salvadoran  "mara" (street gang) works as it is shown in La Vida Loca by Christian Poveda.

The French-Spanish director goes inside the private world of these youngsters who dream and suffer like other youth but are marked by a rebellious attitude caused by broken families and social exclusion; death by shooting from a rival gang is often the end of that situation. The director follows them into their houses, in jail, in court, playing, committing offences and making mistakes. Several members died while filming.

The director uses La Vida Loca to unravel the causes of the extreme violence in El Salvador. The director believes that the youngsters "are the victims of a system that does not forgive".

It a hard documentary that does not judge its characters."

DEUTSCHE WELLE
José Ospina Valencia

 
"The crude reality of the Salvadoran street gangs.

A nonjudgmental, hard documentary showing without concessions the life of criminal Salvadoran street gangs."

LA OPINION DE TENERIFE

"Titles tend to be misleading many times. La Vida Loca sounds like Ricki Martin, a night goddess, a goddess of voodoo and drinks of narcotic taste. However, directed by Christian Poveda and produced in Spain, México and France, La Vida Loca shows filming an on-going, all-out-war between two notorious and dreadful gangs known as the Salvatrucha  gang and the 18 Gang. Socially excluded, violent, grown out of everything, with nothing to win or to lose but with lots of sniffing drugs and to go round, their kingdom and their grave belong to this world. The film is shot with too much truth in it (...)."

DIARIO VASCO
B.T.

"Using the camara as witness and without providing any interpretation by the director, the main characters tell their stories, their disagreements, dreams and frustrations. And from a different perspective, Christian Poveda succeeds at presenting the street gangs from El Salvador and the violence they inflict on the country."

LA JORNADA MICHOACAN

"The intense world of El Salvador gangs is lensed with in-your-face style in docu helmer Christian Poveda's problematically nonjudgmental La Vida Loca. Poveda spent one year with the ultra-violent, heavily tattooed members of the M-18s, and, though he shows the brutality, the helmer adopts a sympathetic tone that, if not quite glamorizing the life, conveys the sense of an enthralled anthropologist unsuccessfully struggling for objectivity.

Docu employs a cyclical rhythm, following various members as they boast and briefly describe their lives."

VARIETY
Jay Weissberg

"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.""

VARIETY
Bob Flynn