Several South Los Angeles girls with no previous acting experience were plucked from area high schools and placed on the set of "Down for Life" along side such stars as Danny Glover, Kate del Castillo and Snoop Dogg.
Director Alan Jacobs said
they met thousands of youths at several area schools before finding the handful of Latinas who play the movie's principal gang-member roles.
"I figured it would be easier to teach a street kid to act than to teach a teen actor to play street," he writes in the L.A. Times.
Wilmington teenager Jessica Romero, who wants to become a marine biologist, plays a
girl-gang leader. Fellow cast members Andrea Valenzuela and Isamar Guijarro are both first-generation Mexican American daughters of immigrants.
Guijarro, who will turn 18 next month and wants to study theater and dance at community college this spring. Valenzuela, who also will turn 18 next month, entered UC Santa Barbara this fall as a freshman political science student.
"Down for Life," which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is based on a 2005 New York Times article, "
Essays in Search of Happy Endings" by reporter Michael Winerip, about a class at Locke in which students were assigned to write about one day in their lives.
Shot on location in South Central and other L.A. locales, "Down for Life" follows girl gang bangers and tensions between L.A. Latinos and African Americans.
