Imperdonable
PerSo Award

DIRECTORS’ STATEMENTS

I have lived in El Salvador for 7 years, in which I have tried to assimilate and understand a daily life that still seems to me extreme, wild, and a society that has learned to live in the middle of a normality full of violence and cruelty that were alien to me before I arrived in the country. The main agents of this violence are the gangs, and the majority of stories that are told to the world from El  Salvador relate the war between these criminal structures and the way in which it defines Salvadoran society. It is one of the best known, studied and explained topics about this region. For that reason, and because I considered that I had nothing new to contribute, I had never thought of making a documentary related to that subject. However, when my husband – a Salvadoran journalist specialized in gangs issues – told me, astonished, about those peculiar prisoners who inhabited a small isolation cell inside a gang prison, I knew I had a story that had not been told before, through which I could add a new and unique perspective. 

Although the two main Salvadoran gangs, Mara Salvatrucha 13 and 18th Street gang, are fighting a deadly war with each other, they share norms and values that regulate their internal life. One of those norms is that gangs consider homosexuality a shameful aberration and therefore they punish it with death, with death by torture. All the inmates of that isolation cell were gang members and were isolated for having openly expressed their homosexuality. The very fact that they existed seemed incredible to me. I wondered why someone would integrate a criminal organization that hates their identity in such a way; I wondered even if inside that tiny cell they finally feel free; I wondered about his own notions of masculinity in a macho culture. But all those questions were overshadowed when, during filming, one of them told us:  “Killing a man is not that difficult, but loving one that’s something unnatural”.

In what kind of society is that idea conceivable? That man was giving us a deep explanation of his own world and I decided that through this film I would try to make sense of that sentence. The result is a documentary that portrays how far a society can break down and pervert the notions of right and wrong, love and hate, acceptable and repudiable, forgivable and unforgivable. A story whose protagonist lives on the boundaries of everything mentioned above and that today is still impossible for me to define with certainty what I myself feel for them.