Sundance. Made in America.

"Stacy Peralta's Made in America is an effective and selectively comprehensive, fascinating and frustrating examination of the history of gangs in South Los Angeles," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "For a film that makes a convincing and valuable case that gang warfare is, at its root, an economic problem, it's baffling how little attention is paid to how the rise of the superstar gangster in pop culture has impacted the real people living this life."

"Peralta builds a case that the long-running gang war and all its associated pathologies resulted from a perfect storm of toxic ingredients: restrictive real-estate covenants, the notorious paramilitary racism of the LAPD, the rapid deindustrialization of Los Angeles in the decades after World War II and the implosion of the African-American family," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Some of that may sound like old-school, blame-society white liberalism, but the film is far more complicated than that.... As Peralta told me during a fascinating interview on Tuesday (see the video here), his central intention is to humanize these young men, so often regarded as members of some predatory, not-quite-human species. 'These are American teenagers, and we need to treat them that way,' he said. 'If 28 percent of the white male population were in prison, I kind of think we'd be doing something about it.'"

"The film is incredibly well crafted," writes Mike Raffensperger at Zoom In Online. "Powerful scenes of heartbroken mothers, desperate children and powerless participants invoke feelings of desperation, strengthening the empathy felt for those living inside the undeniable hopelessness the situation spawns. Mercifully, the concluding portion of the film offers a possible solution, or at least a step in the right direction; a mature choice which adds emotional reprieve and tangible social value to the work."

And he points to Jon Saraceno's piece in USA Today on Golden State Warrior Baron Davis's role as a producer and Eric Lavallee's interview with Peralta for IonCinema.

Chris Lee talks with Peralta for the Los Angeles Times and notes that the film "posits that Los Angeles' gang strife has lasted longer and claimed more lives than the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland and resulted in a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder among the children in South LA than among those in Baghdad."

Posted by dwhudson at January 27, 2008 1:03 PM