This article was going to mention my film but according to the writer her editors cut that part out. oh well, it's still an interesting piece. i'll paste it here:
400 Dead Women: Now Hollywood Is IntriguedPosted by steev at Mayo 22, 2006 10:39 AM
By PAT H. BROESKE
Published: May 21, 2006
THE killings, nearly everyone agrees, began in 1993. The victims, all poor women, were raped, strangled and mutilated, with signs of ritual murder. Because they were a particular type — young and slender, with brown skin and long brown hair — there was speculation about a serial killer.
The crimes took place in Juárez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, and they have continued for 13 years, with no end in sight.
With a body count now estimated at some 400, the killings have been called the maquiladora murders because some of the victims worked in the city's factories, which are also known as maquiladoras.
Given that kind of sensationalism, it was inevitable that Hollywood would enter the picture, and now it has, twice. "The Virgin of Juárez," a drama with a supernatural subplot starring Minnie Driver, was made for just $1 million and is playing the festival circuit. Meanwhile "Bordertown" — an action-thriller with Jennifer Lopez budgeted at $35 million — is in post-production, though a release date has not been set. The scripts for both were read in advance by Artists for Amnesty, the Hollywood arm of Amnesty International, for suggestions about the depiction of the case facts. But based on a screening of the former and the screenplay for the latter, neither movie suggests the scope of the issue.
For the mystery of the murdered women of Juárez has evolved into more than a crime story. Words like "femicide," "machismo," "misogyny" and "impunity" have entered a much broader debate about the city and its connection to issues of race, class and gender. And, less predictably, Juárez has become the heart of an impassioned grass-roots artists' movement.
"I realized I could put something together to echo the voices of the victims," said Azul Luna, a Los Angeles photographer and digital artist who traveled to Juárez to document the scene. The founder of an artists' collective that raises awareness about the crimes and the larger issue of violence again women, she once led a caravan of artists from California to El Paso and across the river to Juárez.
In Los Angeles, Rubén Amavizca's play "The Women of Juárez" ("Las Mujeres de Juárez") has become a staple at the Frida Kahlo Theater, with performances in both English and Spanish. Several books, both fiction and nonfiction, are in the works, and there have been songs about the killings by the Mexican groups Los Tigres del Norte and Jaguares, and by Tori Amos.
The Juárez violence has also become the subject of treatises in scholarly journals and university symposiums and has galvanized human rights and women's rights activists. And American celebrities have become involved: on May 9, Jane Fonda and Eve Ensler were among those who participated in a Mexico City reading of Ms. Ensler's feminist work, "The Vagina Monologues," with proceeds benefiting a women's shelter in Juárez. Two years earlier Ms. Fonda, Sally Field, Christine Lahti and Ms. Ensler led a much-publicized march from El Paso to Juárez.
Juárez, Mexico's fourth-largest city, with a population of about 1.3 million, is a teeming industrial center dominated by hundreds of multinational assembly plants. Women drawn to Juárez from villages across Mexico provide the majority of the cheap labor, typically for about $6 a day.
As bodies continue to turn up, so have a host of theories. Satanists, organ harvesters and drug cartels have been among the suspects. (Juárez is a major drug conduit to the United States.) So have the sons of wealthy men, who, it has been said, hunt and kill women for sport. Even husbands and boyfriends have been suspected. But so far the only consensus is that a phenomenon once attributed to a single serial killer has become a wider crime wave involving multiple murderers.
"Now it's a monster," the actress Vanessa Bauche said in a telephone interview from Mexico City. "You can cut off one head, and there will appear three more. This is one of the darkest stories in Latin America."
The founder of an artists' group that works with relatives of the Juárez victims, Ms. Bauche, the star of the Mexican New Wave film "Amores Perros," is co-producer of a documentary that will include interviews with victims' relatives, some of whom have received threats. "The only way we have to protect them is to make them famous," she said.
The killings have been the subject of numerous Spanish-language television programs in both Mexico and in the United States on the Telemundo and Univision networks, as well as several lurid direct-to-video movies. On a more literate front, the acclaimed Mexican playwright Sabina Berman has recently completed the script for "Backyard," a film based on four true stories. "My screenplay is very social minded, political minded," she said. "It talks about the politics of globalization. Juárez is just one example of what can go wrong with globalization."
Ms. Berman said she applauded Hollywood's interest in Juárez, "not just the crimes, but the wave of violence against women," adding, "Of course it would be better to not trivialize and sensationalize, or sexualize, the story."
Debbie Nathan, a journalist who has written extensively about border issues and sexual politics, questioned Hollywood's tendency to simplify. "This situation is about so much more than serial killers," said Ms. Nathan, who worries that movies about the murders "could be a kind of reality porn."
The Australian director Kevin James Dobson said he shared some of that concern when making "The Virgin of Juárez."
"Did I worry about exploitation?" he said. "In a word, yes. The attacks I showed are fictionalized, but the facts spoken are true."
Mr. Dobson said he first learned about the murdered women while searching a Web site about serial killers. "I had the idea to bring Joan of Arc to Juárez," he said, referring to a victim (played in the movie by Ana Claudia Talancón) who develops stigmata and has visions, and who is befriended by a feisty female reporter.
"Bordertown" is also about a female reporter, played by Ms. Lopez, who befriends an attack victim (Maya Zapata). Gregory Nava, the film's writer and director, who previously teamed with Ms. Lopez on the 1997 film "Selena," declined requests for an interview. And the publicist for Ms. Lopez, who is also the film's executive producer, did not respond to requests for an interview with the star.
Marisela Ortiz, a former teacher of one of the Juárez victims and an advocate for victims and their relatives, said she welcomed the prospect of a Hollywood movie about the murders, "in spite of the film presenting a different premise from reality." She was referring to scenes in "Bordertown" pointing to a group of bus drivers as the culprits, a theory that has since been debunked.
The catalyst for many of the artists, filmmakers and activists involved in the Juárez mystery was a 2001 documentary titled "Seńorita Extraviada" ("Missing Young Woman"). The veteran Bay Area filmmaker Lourdes Portillo spent 18 months on the project, which received a special jury prize at Sundance four years ago and was broadcast on PBS in the United States. To this day it grips a viewer's attention, from the opening narration, "The desert is full of secrets, some of them buried in the sands," to its accusations of police and governmental negligence and cover-ups.
"You are talking about a very complex problem involving a culture that diminishes the role of women in life," said Ms. Portillo, a native of Chihuahua, in northern Mexico.
A number of new documentaries from both sides of the border are in the works, including Lorena Mendez-Quiroga's "Border Echoes" ("Ecos de Una Frontera"). A freelance television reporter and the founder of the Los Angeles-based Justice for the Women of Juárez, Ms. Mendez-Quiroga made more than 30 trips to Juárez and mortgaged her house to complete the film, which looks at the crimes through the eyes and investigative work of Diana Washington Valdez, a reporter at The El Paso Times who has long been at the forefront of the Juárez story. Ms. Valdez has said she is going to be "naming names" of suspects in the film, which Ms. Mendez-Quiroga hopes to screen at the next Sundance Film Festival.
Another project in development is an HBO feature written by Josefina Lopez, a playwright and screenwriter whose credits include the screenplay for the 2001 film "Real Women Have Curves." To research her project Ms. Lopez visited a desert area near Juárez called Lomas de Poleo, where the bodies of eight young women were found. "I'm very sensitive in that sometimes I can pick up energy," she said, "like ghosts and stuff like that. And as I stood there, I could feel the souls of the women, their spirits."
Ms. Lopez went on to talk about the women who ventured to Juárez from central and southern Mexico in search of work, only to die gruesomely. "When I stood and looked where the bodies had been dumped, I kept thinking, these poor women, their spirits, they're wandering," she said, raising a question that filmmakers and other artists are now left to answer. "How are they ever going to get home?"