Libero Bizzarri Award goes to Vida Loca

Intro

Drugs, jail, death. Three dots tattooed on the skin.
The only three alternatives for the pandilleros, the kids of the Latin American street gangs.

The two most violent gangs are the Mara Salvatrucha 13 and the Barrio 18. These are rapidly expanding criminal transnational organizations, now found all over the world. The MS13 and XV3 are similar but different, bound together in an insane rivalry, fighting in suburbs from El Salvador to Los Angeles.

Young boys are recruited as teenagers and thrown into bloody fights for slums control. They are drug dealers, drug addicts, they steal and kill, while most of them aren’t even 20 years old. Forgotten by everyone, hunted by police, they live the "Vida Loca", an insane life hanging between lawlessness and death.

This is a journey inside and outside their world to try to understand these “notorious” teenagers.

A documentary by Stefania Andreotti (Aplysia, 2007).

Saturday, October 18, 2008