Narco Cultura Official Trailer

[Jesus Malverde]

We know too much about Mexico's drug war and not enough. We hear about it constantly, about the 60,000 murders and the slaughter of innocents, but getting a sense of what that means on the ground — and how pervasive its cultural influence is — is harder to come by. The potent documentary "Narco Cultura" is an excellent place to start.

This dispassionate but devastating film looks at the drug wars from two very different but chillingly complementary perspectives. As directed and shot by Shaul Schwarz, an accomplished photojournalist who spent two years in this world as a still photographer before starting to film, "Narco Cultura" benefits from the access Schwarz earned through his time on the ground.

What this film does is reveal two very different societies — both exhibiting, each in its own way, unmistakable signs of collapse. What's happening on the ground in Juarez, an epicenter of killing sometimes known as the murder capital of the world, is bad enough, but how that slaughter is reflected and refracted through the lens of Mexican American popular culture is in some ways equally shocking.

Our guides to these complementary worlds are completely different. In Juarez, we are in the company of Richi Soto, a soft-spoken but dogged crime scene investigator, while in Los Angeles and on tour we hang out with Edgar Quintero. He's an ebullient twentysomething who is a rising star in the writing and performing of narcocorridos, hugely popular songs that glibly celebrate the savage killings and killers whose handiwork Soto painstakingly probes.


http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-narco-cultura-juarzez-murders-20131206,0,6263312.story