The film’s nuanced portrayal of the former gang members’ experience won it international praise and prizes at a string of major film festivals in 2020, making it the first Salvadoran film to be eligible for an Oscar. “But loving another man, that’s not natural.” “I think killing a person, yes it’s bad but it’s not that difficult,” he says at one point. Living in the isolation cell with his partner and other gay inmates, he grapples with both his sexuality and his violent past. 8-follows Geovany, a gay man who worked as a hitman for Barrio 18 and left the gang in 2016. The short documentary they produced, Unforgivable-premiering worldwide via Vimeo on Demand from Feb. The state had effectively ceded control of daily life inside Gotera to church leaders, who preach that homosexuality is a sin as grave as violence.Īs soon as Martinez left the prison and got in his car, he called Marlén Viñayo, 33, a Spanish director living in El Salvador, to tell her what he’d seen. Starting in 2015, evangelical pastors had converted almost all of the prisoners there to Christianity, and convinced them to leave their gangs. In this particular prison, San Francisco Gotera, in the east of the Central American country, gang culture was not the only source of virulent homophobia.
