Last night when I came back to my hotel room here in La Paz, La Virgin de las Sicarios (Our Lady of Assassins) was on cable- sin subtitilos. Watching it in Spanish and only understanding 10 percent of the dialog was a different experience than the first time I watched it in Tucson, Arizona, with translations, in a room full of apathetic teenage junkies. This time, the visual elements stuck out more- how the weird Dr. Who look of HD video brings you into the film and makes it all the more disturbing, the shocking bursts of violence and how they pop off like fireworks as in Breathless or, yes, even Fireworks, the clumsy visual symbols and heavy-handed religious allegories that are obvious even without understanding the verbose dialog.
If you haven't seen Our Lady of Assassins, I recommend it, though I can't claim it will make you sleep well at night (except maybe drifting off mentally repeating the mantra "At least I don't live in Medellín, Columbia"). It is a morality play set in an alternate universe of morality where Uzis, Nikes and sportbikes are more important than human life and where even the "well educated" and religious can buy into the delirious nihilism of complete destruction.
Like the early novels of Brett Easton Ellis, Assassins... takes us behind the scenes of spiritual degradation and casual evil, then hits us with an almost Dosoevskian moral theme. And like most of Easton Ellis, it's also sardonically and misanthropically funny. Even with out verbal reference I found myself laughing at the film´s star Germán Jaramillo looking like a silent-movie straight-man, shrugging as his teenage companion wastes another after another of their fellow Columbians.
The nearest film I can think of to compare it to is City of God because of it's home-grown cast and shocking violence, though with it's bargain basement DV look, Assassins.. is actually the rawer of the two. And considering it's central of image of a sexual relationship between an older man and a teenage boy, the film must be completely unpalatable to a large part of the huge international audience that City of God found.
Perhaps even more shocking than City..´s closing disclosure that it had all been based on a true story is learning that Assassin..'s main character, author Fernando Vallejo, shares a name with the controversial author of the novel La Virgin de los Sicarios. Although both Vallejo and the films director Barbet Schroeder claim that it is largely fiction, one wonders of much of Assassins.. is true and how much of it's reproachable antihero exists in the real Fernando Vallejo.
Moreover, how much of Schroeders motives behind making the movie were moral outrage and how much his own pervy voyeurism. In a great interview from BOMB magazine by Ken Foster, Schroeder is quoted as saying the sexuality in the the film is "by nature and essence, innocent". This is the kind of explanations you might expect from Larry Clark about his kiddie-pornish tendencies, or perhaps more accurately it sounds like NAMBLA apologetics straight out of Hakim Bey. Here's a telling excerpt from the same interview:

bs- (Schroeder) The first person I went to in Medellín when I was about to cast was the person who introduced the real boy to the real writer a few years before I was there. I went to meet him, and said, "Well, do you have another one?" (laughter)

The issues of author/subject and art/reality are adressed directly in Assassins.., and in a postmodern twist they have leapt right off the screen. Schroeder admits that many of his young actors who had been involved in street crime before have taken their paychecks from the film and gotten into more trouble with the law. Like City of God's director Fernando Meirelles (who also experienced his former actors using his studios money to dire results), Schroeder says he can't be forever responsible for his charges. But once Schroeder paid an underage street kid to act out sex acts and street violence, isn't he just as culpable as Asassin's moraly tortured protagonist?