"You don't go to jail expecting to find love."
And even less if that one is Carlos Martínez (San Salvador, 41 years old), a journalist who has spent almost two decades portraying with his words the cruelty of the gangs that have made El Salvador one of the most violent countries in the world, and if the prison he is talking about is that of San Francisco Gotera, where more than 1,600 rival prisoners from the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18. For these groups, love between men is paid for with death.
For this reason, when in April 2019 Martínez arrived at a maximum security module of that prison and found a group of gang members who had practically every inch of their skin tattooed loving and protecting themselves, it seemed “almost impossible”.
“It was extraordinary and it occurred to me, frankly, that it was very difficult to be able to tell this to this society at the point of letters and descriptions.
And literally, getting out of prison, I spoke to the best filmmaker I know in the world, ”explains Martínez.
“I'm very interested in it,” Marlén Viñayo (León, 1987), a Spanish documentary filmmaker based in El Salvador since 2013, told him on the other end of the phone, where she created the production company
La Jaula Abierta
.
In just over a month, the journalist and documentary filmmaker, who are a couple, were inside the jail in a race against time to tell an extraordinary story, that of Geovanny.
He is a young man who at only 12 years old joined the gang where he became a ruthless hit man and who, with just over 25, is serving a sentence of more than three decades in jail, the place where he converted to the evangelical church and where he found love.
The film portrays the dilemmas of a group of men convicted of violent crimes and those who discover their sexuality confronts their religion, their gang, the prejudices of society and themselves.
"I think that killing a person is bad, but it is not that difficult, but loving another man is something out of the ordinary," says Geovanny in the key phrase of the documentary, around which the creators of
Unforgivable
gave shape history.
For Martínez and Viñayo, the 35-minute short film involved intense work to undo preconceptions and explore an unknown reality in which the protagonists manage to be free in a tiny isolation cell.
There, Viñayo and Neil Brandvold, the director of photography, filmed for 12 days with the challenge of “disappearing” to try to prevent their presence from altering the daily life of the prisoners.
"From almost the first days reality gave us powerful scenes," says the director.
Today Unforgivable is on the way to being the first representative of El Salvador at the Oscars and has been praised by renowned filmmakers, such as the American Barry Jenkins, who defined it as "the movie of the year."
Jenkins is the director of
Moonlight
, a love story that takes place in Miami between two poor African Americans, one of them also a gang member, and that in 2017 won three Oscars, including for best picture.
Thanks to the awards it has won in the international festival circuit,
Unforgivable
, which could be defined as the Latin American version of that romance, already has the necessary qualifications to be eligible for one of those awards.
“We are registered.
In February they publish the list of ten finalists, in March the five nominees and in April it is the ceremony, ”says Viñayo.
EL PAÍS spoke with the director and scriptwriter of the documentary, Marlén Viñayo and Carlos Martínez, about the ins and outs of the story and the challenges of recording.
This is a shortened version of that interview.
P. Carlos: you have been covering the phenomenon of gangs for years.
What did you think when you came across this module of gay gang members?
Carlos Martínez (CM).
I have a decade or so of being responsible for trying to translate the very complex phenomenon of gangs and the violence that this implies.
One of the first things one learns is that gangs have such deep roots and roots in our society because they are essentially us.
They are a fuchsia reproduction of the societies in which they thrive.
People from the Mara Salvatrucha or Barrio 18 have gone to Barcelona, to the United States, they have been to Madrid, but they are not fertile societies for this phenomenon to prosper.
Here they thrive because they reflect in a fuchsia, highlighted, criminal way, who we are.
The gangs are mostly made up of young people, like us;
poor, like us;
excluded and the product of huge gaps between opulence and poverty, which is what describes this country.
They are homophobic, like us;
they are macho, like us;
they are violent, like us.
And one of the things that that implies is that they consider homosexuality a kind of shameful and humiliating condition.
Therefore, they not only despise homosexuality and homosexuals or any other expression of sexual or gender identity, like Salvadoran society, [but they do it] in fuchsia.
That is to say, they are murdered and murdered by torture.
And it is one of the first things that becomes very clear when one knows the gang phenomenon.
If they suspect that someone is gay or that they have behaviors that they consider gay, they kill them in a terrible way.
Finding that there was a group of boys with stained faces, with numbers and letters in the ink of that flowery war who had decided to live their homosexuality in an open way seemed to me nothing short of impossible.
And they were mixed.
It is difficult from the outside to imagine what that means: People from the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 not only not killing each other but loving each other, protecting themselves and it was extraordinary.
P. Marlén: in your previous project,
Cachada
, you spent months recording and living with the protagonists, five mothers and street vendors who decide to take their lives to the theater.
Unforgivable
is filmed in 12 days and in a very limited space and with many regulations.
How did you meet those challenges?
Marlén Viñayo (MV).
The first question was: are we going to get permission?
We had very little time because when Carlos met the protagonists it was in April 2019 and on June 1 the president changed, Nayib Bukele entered.
And we knew that, from that moment on, we were not going to be able to get any permits.
We had to act very quickly, assemble the team very quickly and we went to ask permission from the General Directorate of Penal Centers, with the surprise that they gave us 15 days.
With permission came the other challenge.
As you say, in
Cachada
I was filming for more than a year and a half and I could go to film whenever I wanted, to each rehearsal, to each house of the protagonists, and my style of documentary is a lot to be in the place observing and portraying reality without intervening.
And through that, reality gives you to build a story.
So here, with only 12 days, it was a challenge.
And the other is that when we started filming we didn't know what this story was about.
CM.
Not when we finished (they laugh)
MV.
We didn't know what the story was about.
We just had ideas of things that interested us.
For example, I was very interested in trying to understand why these people decide to be part of a criminal organization that hates them for who they are.
Another idea is that, when Carlos met them, at some point one said that in that tiny cell he felt free.
In fact, the first provisional title of the film was 'Free', but all this without having entered to film.
The challenge was to arrive and take advantage of those 12 days by being alert, listening, hearing reality to see what it had to tell us.
And so was the filming process.
With a lot of uncertainty.
Q. And how was the selection of the protagonists, those powerful characters, of Geovanny and her boyfriend Steven, with all the dilemmas they have?
CM.
Marlén asked me that part of the pre-production process consisted of making a first approach to these characters and interviewing them, which offered several things: a first contact with their own dilemmas, with their own existence, but also, with the ease or loquacity that the characters may have when it comes to going out in front of a camera.
And it was almost natural because this little boy, Geovanny, calls himself 'Strawberry'.
The guy was a hit man.
Inside the cell, everyone is there for homicide and they said: "The bad guy is this guy."
This guy did things that have no name, it's terrible.
But at the same time it is very difficult to associate the word tenderness to a hit man from a criminal organization and 'Strawberry' was like profound.
MV.
And I was deeply in love with Steven and there we saw that there was a conflict.
His story and being able to include his conflict with Steven, who was a super interesting character due to the internal conflicts that he himself had, was what led us to choose him as the protagonist.
CM.
The intensity with which this boy had fallen in love and had experienced this kind of madness that is to fall in love was visible.
This guy looked at Steven and his eyes opened and it was evident that they loved each other and that there was a conflict in the middle capable of saying many things, of portraying in that relationship and the way in which they lived that relationship, talking about a lot of stuff.
We like to think that what we discover through the love story, what is there, is a society with a perverted, broken, maddened moral compass.
These conclusions, which we see clear today, took us months to arrive.
We argued with Marlén for months, on the verge of divorce, and it was a fascinating, exquisite, hilarious process of saying what the hell we have done.
What do we have in those images, what story do we tell.
During filming we were intuiting.
We would stay in a little hotel near the prison and say what happened now and tell anecdotes.
P. In the documentary, Geovanny asks to be transferred to another prison.
He got it?
Have they been able to maintain contact with the protagonists?
MV.
We have not been able to communicate with them since the last day of filming.
What we do know is that Geovanny was not approved for transfer and then there were a series of massive transfers and many things changed with the new government of the prison system.
And the people who were in Gotera were transferred to another prison and the latest news we have is that both Geovanny and Steven are in a prison called Izalco and are inside the evangelical church.
Q. What has been the reaction in El Salvador to this documentary that is winning so many awards but that at the same time portrays very complex and still taboo subjects for society?
CM.
One of the production houses is [the digital medium]
El Faro
, associated with
Jaula Abierta
and that puts a context in this country.
We are at a time in El Salvador where the emergence of a personalist caudillo, who is the president, who has decided that he detests us and that
El Far
is one of his adversaries.
In that context, almost anything that is associated with the newspaper starts from a context for a lot of people who love and believe in this leader.
The film addresses two of the most sensitive issues for Salvadorans.
On the one hand gangs, which have done profound damage to society, and on the other hand homosexuality.
This is a country, like much of Latin America, deeply homophobic.
Mixing the two into a movie is like the perfect form for controversy.
On the one hand, there are those who are very happy that they can raise the bar and prove, as Marlén has proven, that high-quality cinema can be made from El Salvador.
And that has raised a lot of expectation in the filmmaker community.
On the other hand, there are many people interested in the story.
The trailer has more than five million views and a ton of comments ranging from congratulations, insults, bewilderment.
There are many people who tell us that with so many beautiful things in the country we go to a prison to portray gang members who are also homosexuals.
MV.
There are also many surprise comments, which say that what is necessary to tell.
There are many people who have been moved by the trailer.
They touch a fiber that makes them connect.
And I was also very surprised by the support and interest that it has aroused internationally.
Q. This is their first joint work and each one came with a different perspective: Carlos, of counting gangs through journalism, and Marlén of looking for the face of daily violence in
Cachada
.
What have they learned from this experience?
MV.
I am very interested in exploring and trying to explain the complexity of the human being.
With
Cachada
, reality taught me that human beings are not perfect good or perfect bad, but that everything is much more complex.
And this project taught me completely: a person who has been a murderer and who has done horrible things, but after knowing their story and being with them for 12 days, he reaffirmed that human beings are very complex and that it is not a matter of good perfect or perfect bad.
CM.
This documentary sent me home with the surprise jumping in my head of what have we done, what society have we built ?;
How could we build a way of inhabiting the world in which, so clearly, we do not all fit in the same way ?;
How is it possible for a 12-year-old to become a murderer ?;
How is it possible that they have sexually abused a boy ?;
How is it possible that this guy has committed such heinous criminal acts?
And above all, how is it possible that love can be pronounced at the same time as killing?
The reality and exploration of societies so complex, so hurt, so traumatized and so designed for cruelty never ceases to amaze me.