Fiction series on Mara Salvatrucha wins Webby Award
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Filmmaker fascination with the violent Mara Salvatrucha street gangs continues, and this time it’s a Web fiction series that’s garnering attention.
‘The Ten Commandments of la Vida Loca, ‘ a Web series of short fiction films that tell the story of two brothers who decide to join the Mara Salvatrucha, will receive the Webby Award for best drama series during a ceremony in New York this evening. You will be able to see clips of the event on the Webby Awards YouTube channel.
The fiction series was funded by Filmaka, an online global creative organization that focuses on ‘inspiring and rewarding creativity and talent by providing professional opportunities for directors and writers all around the world,’ according to its website.
The winning Web series was created by the Mexico City-based team of Luis Bernal Salazar (direction), Rodrigo Lopez Aldana (photography) and Arturo Gonzalez Alonso (production).
Webby Awards are considered among the highest honors for Web-based content, and the series is the only foreign-language project to win an award in the 13th annual contest.
‘The Ten Commandments of la Vida Loca’ is one of numerous projects in the last year that focused on the Mara Salvatrucha gangs.
Most recently, we featured the documentary by Christian Poveda called ‘La Vida Loca,’ for which the director spent 16 months filming the gangs in San Salvador.
The feature film ‘Sin Nombre,’ currently running in cinemas in Mexico, also features Mara Salvatrucha gang members in a story that crosses borders and tackles the hot-button issue of immigration between Latin America and the United States.
Last year, Spanish photographer Isabel Muñoz documented the gangs in prisons in El Salvador in an exhibition that showed in Mexico City.
--Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
*Edited at 5pm Mexico City time. The award ceremony is on Monday 8th June.