Mexican narco cinema turns the drug trade into direct-to-video entertainment: cheaply made action films, sold in border-town markets, that dramatize cartel shootouts and trafficking runs for an audience that already knows the real thing. VICE traces the genre back to narcocorridos, the ballads that turned drug lords into folk heroes long before cameras got involved, then follows a correspondent to Tijuana to see the industry firsthand. There he lands a walk-on role in an actual narco film shoot, watching a low-budget crew stage gunfights and drug deals blocks away from a city with its own well-documented cartel violence. Interviews with people inside the genre lay out its appeal and its contradiction: these films condemn the brutality of trafficking while making its protagonists look like outlaws worth admiring. The film treats the genre as a real cultural product rather than a curiosity, using the Tijuana shoot to show how directly these movies borrow from, and feed back into, the world they depict.