Narco Cultura

The documentary runs two lives beside each other. One is a musician in Los Angeles who sings narcocorridos, writing songs in praise of cartel bosses, carrying a prop bazooka on stage, making his name out of it. The other is a crime-scene investigator in Ciudad Juárez who counts bodies every day, watches colleagues get killed, and knows he is on a list. Two ends of the same culture: crime as an image on one side, as a funeral on the other. Shaul Schwarz came out of photojournalism, and his film screened at Sundance in 2013. It shows the drug war as a production of popular culture as much as a security problem, asking who counts as a hero on both sides of the border at once.