![]() ![]() ![]() Martinez, though, says Unforgivable isn’t a film “about gangs,” or an attempt to redeem their members, but an examination of the culture that allowed Geovany to arrive at his twisted moral conclusion. This week police arrested three gang members for an armed attack on a Doctors Without Borders ambulance. Though gang violence and murder rates have plummeted over the last year-which many suspect is the result of a secret pact between the gangs and President Nayib Bukele-there are an estimated 60,000 gang members in a country of 7 million, and they have killed tens of thousands over the past decade. And sympathy for gang members is a tough sell. Homosexuality remains taboo and violence and discrimination against LGBTQ people is rife. Evangelical churches are a growing influence in El Salvador, far outstripping the state and just pipping the Catholic Church to become the country’s most trusted institution in 2016, according to public research institute IUDOP. But it is likely to be controversial at home. 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. ![]() Tandav, an Amazon series, was forced to delete several scenes after its creators faced charges in court and were summoned by the BJP government for allegedly insulting Hindu gods and the office of the prime minister.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. The BBC/Netflix television adaptation of A Suitable Boy was also accused of hurting religious sentiments by senior BJP ministers and subjected to police complaints for a scene of a Hindu girl and Muslim boy kissing near a temple. The blockbuster is not the first to fall afoul of rightwing Hindu groups since the BJP government came to power. Oppenheimer has proved popular with Indian audiences, taking £1.2m on the first day alone, the biggest box office opening day for a Hollywood film in India this year. The film was rated U/A, which recommends parental guidance for viewers aged under 12. He alleged it amounted to “waging a war on the Hindu community” and almost appeared to be part of a “larger conspiracy by anti-Hindu forces”.Īnurag Thakur, the information and culture minister, was among those to demand that the scene be removed and called for action to be taken against India’s Central Board of Film Certification. In an open letter, Uday Mahurkar, an information commissioner, said the scene was “a direct assault on religious beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus”. The presence of the Bhagavad Gita in the middle of the sex scene prompted a member of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) government to call the film an “attack on Hinduism”. Oppenheimer taught himself Sanskrit and during his life, he spoke of drawing from the Hindu text. ![]() The words he reads aloud, which he translates from Sanskrit, are those of the god Krishna – “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” – a quote the real Oppenheimer recalled after the first detonation of the atomic bomb he had invented. ![]()
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