En Busca de la Vida/Looking for Life

In Latin America, the telenovela is one of the most popular and pervasive art forms. These television shows are often 
compared to American soap operas because of their focus on love, family, and their often melodramatic approach to 
representing quotidian problems. Telenovelas differ from the soap opera in several major ways, though, particularly their pervasiveness -- almost everyone watches them, because they come on in prime time -- the gender of their audiences -- as much male as female -- and their ideological impact. With several notable exceptions, telenovelas from Brazil to Mexico present the world through the eyes of the upper class, presenting wealth as the only reasonable goal in the world.

A group of young indigenous Bolivians, fans of many telenovelas but not of the consequences these TV shows have on 
their communities, which present the poor as having worth only because of their relationship with the rich. So they decided to make a "telenovela from the bottom" (or, perhaps, given that they live in the shantytown of El Alto, at 14,000 feet, 
"from above"). En Busca de la Vida/Looking for Life uses the tropes of the telenovela to tell a very different story, one 
about hope and resistance.

Today's post is the first episode, as the children and teenagers were learning to film and tell stories. I'm now in Bolivia, 
filming episodes 6-15, and they have now reached a level that is nearly professional, and certainly better than any other 
telenovela I have seen in Bolivia. The show has its own blog, where I have posted several more episodes (the 
commentaries are in Spanish, but the episodes have English subtitles) and its own YouTube Channel.