Sometimes, when documentary film-makers get too close to the truth, they end up dead. This is what happened to Christian Poveda, aged 52, a French photographer and documentary film-maker, shot dead in El Salvador, a country he loved and where he had recently finished filming the Mara gangs and their strange world of savage initiation rites and fanatical loyalty and the decimation of young people there. The Mara Salvatrucha gang developed among the Salvadoran slums in Los Angeles and spread to El Salvador after the Americans deported the gang members.
Poveda was shot in the head in the car he was returning in after a day’s filming. Just before his death, Poveda had told friends that the gang and the police were unhappy with him. Poveda worked together with Nick Fraser in the making the BBC documentary, Journey to the Far Right.
Violence is a way of life in El Salvador, part of the legacy of a brutal civil war in the 1980s between the Left-wing FMLN guerrillas and the Salvadoran army and death squads blessed and equipped by the USA. This is also the theme of Oliver Stone’s film, Salvador, based on a true story, again that of a photographer covering the conflict. The FMLN have recently won the presidential elections and there are already rumours that the coup in Honduras will be rolled out there next.
La Vida Loca was screened at this year’s Sheffield documentary festival.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment