featured interview:

Steev Hise

Director, On the Edge:

The Femicide in

Ciudad Juarez

(December 2006)

 

Since 1993, hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, a border town across the Rio Bravo from El Paso, have been murdered, marking an alarming rise in statistics from previous years.  The murders are largely left unpursued; worse, when suspects are arrested, they are often simply vocal family members or loved ones who have been speaking out and advocating action.  Under the glare of international pressure, the local authorities have been forced into slow-cooked justice.  When he visited the city, filmmaker Steev Hise decided that he needed to help tell the story, and he's not alone in wanting to broadcast to the unknowing masses; in the upcoming Bordertown, Jennifer Lopez plays a journalist investigating the mounting death toll in Juarez.  But Hise's film is without fiction, and, in about an hour, gives a quick and compelling overview of the many contributing factors to a city climate that has proven so hostile toward women (as well as the poor, regardless of gender).

 

In the film, you mention the importance of a pair of resolutions that were before Congress at the time [condemning the murders in Juarez and calling for action] and, since then, those resolutions were passed.  Have there been other important developments in the story since you completed the film?

 

There have been, regarding the people who have been unjustly accused of some of the murders, tortured into confessing and imprisoned.  Four or five of those people have been released; the Chihuahua Supreme Court reviewed their cases, mainly because of pressure from activist groups.  That’s a good development, because that’s the double tragedy of the situation.  Not only are the women being killed, but innocent men are being accused.

 

Yeah, that’s definitely a tragic twist to the story that I didn’t necessarily see coming.  Are the subjects of those arrests typically people who have been speaking out, or are the police just rounding up anybody in order to get some positive headlines in response to the external pressure?

 

It’s both.  They’re looking around for scapegoats, and they usually pick somebody close to the victims.  But some of the people who have been rounded up and tortured are people who were making a big deal about the cases.

 

Those resolutions from Congress are essentially calls for action, right, and not promises of action or plans for action?

 

Yeah, it’s not binding legislation or anything.

 

On the Edge is sort of bookended by [Congresswoman] Hilda Solis, who kind of gives the viewer the impression that Congress is on the march, the cavalry is on the way.  But is that just specific to her, or do you get the impression that they really are taking it seriously in Washington?

 

It’s pretty much a pet issue for her and a couple other congresspeople.  There isn’t really a lot of attention.  I mean, there probably wasn’t a lot of debate in Congress; no one is really going to argue with condemning mass murders.

 

Although I was reading on Amnesty International that it actually was significant that Congress passed the resolutions, because Mexico is considered a friendly nation and Congress has been pretty forgiving of friendly nations in the past.

 

It’s definitely a positive step.  There’s historical precedence for that leading to change, but it’s too early to tell yet.

 

The policy changes that are targeted in On the Edge – NAFTA, corporate accountability, drug legalization – are all pretty faraway fixes at best, wouldn’t you say?

 

(chuckles)  Yeah, it’s very unlikely.

 

Do you think any of those dominoes will fall?

 

Well, I think it’s conceivable that before too long that we’ll decriminalize some drugs in this country.  That would go towards helping – like one of the people in the film says, it’s a fairly obvious idea to decriminalize marijuana.  It might be harder to justify heroin or cocaine, but getting that one thing off the black market…

 

That would make a big impact in Juarez, even just marijuana?

 

Yeah, I mean, it would be incremental.  It would just take that much away from the drug cartel.

 

Charles Bowden and a few other people in the film seem to suggest that the best case would be legalization across the board.

 

Yeah, I would say that’s their position.  One thing Bowden makes clear over and over is that there are so many people benefiting from the drug war and the drug trade.  There’s an economic web that we’re all part of.

 

How did you learn about this situation?  From there, what inspired you to follow through and make a film about it?

 

Well, I think I was peripherally aware of it for a few years.  There had been a little bit of media attention.  In 2003-2004, a friend of mine was doing some local solidarity organizing and he was doing a zine, too.  That’s how I got more and more interested in it.  In fall of 2004, I went along with the International Caravan for Justice, and I was documenting that and intending to do a short 12-minute piece about the Caravan.  Once I got down there, I realized it deserved a lot more attention.

 

For people who may be considering grabbing a camera and chasing their own stories, what would you caution them about as far as the biggest obstacles to overcome?  You’ve done several of these now.

 

Yeah, but this one was the most ambitious.  I’m starting to develop a method and I’ve got some words of wisdom, I guess (laughs).  It has to be something you care about.  With me, it was really unexpected; before I knew it, I was borrowing money and doing only [the film] for about a year, and not really planning ahead.  Other filmmakers look for funding beforehand, and if they don’t find it, they don’t do the project (laughs).  If you’re that kind of person who has that kind of drive, then be prepared to take your savings and go into debt—but otherwise, plan ahead.  The next project I’m going to do is going to be funded beforehand.

 

Also, a lot of times there is a sense of urgency, and you have to balance the urgency with the desire to make the best film you can.  I could have rushed even faster to finish it, but it would suffered.  Or I could have spent three years instead of a year-and-a-half.  But I arrived at a middle ground.  It was “What can I do in this amount of time?  How important is it to get the word out now?”  I feel like it was pretty good timing, because this year there has been more and more attention from other filmmakers, and there’s a Jennifer Lopez film coming out—it might go straight to DVD—and that will help bring attention.  So I feel like my film came during the calm before the storm of attention, and was maybe the first or second alert to people; then when these other films come out, they’ll remember my film and say “Oh, yeah!”

 

There’s some suspicion in your press release that Hollywood isn’t going to get the story right.

 

(laughs)  Yeah.  From people I’ve talked to who have seen the script for Bordertown, it’s pretty typical Hollywood.  But the good thing is that it will get people to be somewhat aware of the real events and the real situation.

 

Was it a conscious goal for you from the outset to keep the runtime down?  All of those issues are kind of Pandora’s boxes onto themselves.

 

Yeah, exactly.  From the start, I definitely wanted it to be an hour flat.  The first cut was like 84 minutes long.  In the other features on the disc, there’s an extended original cut of the narcotrafficking section, and that illustrates how it was really easy to go off on tangents with those issues.  But I realized that I needed to explain the factors, but to stay focused on the women.

 

Something else that contributes to it feeling briskly paced is that you put up statistics and text onscreen while people are talking, instead of sprinkling those into voiceovers from a narrator in between the interview segments.  You kept yourself out of the action entirely.

 

That was another thing – I really wanted to give the audience the information from all the different angles that I encountered.  Everyone had their angle, and I wanted to present all those things in a relatively level way so the audience could digest them instead of having an omniscient narrator say what the position should be.

 

There’s a mother in the film who says that the authorities have accused her of defaming the city.  Did you encounter any resistance when you were doing the film?

 

No, I kept pretty low-profile.

 

Statistics show that six women are murdered in Juarez per every ten men murdered, which represents a dramatic rise.  Are the male cases pursued more diligently?

 

It depends on the class and race of the victims.  But, yeah, there are definitely a lot of poor Mexican men who are victims of the drug violence as well.  Like a couple of the interviewees said, the death of the women is a symbol.  It’s horrible, but it’s a sign of the other things that are going on.

 

The canary in the coal mine.  It’s hard to imagine this not being a bigger story if it was flipped and set on the Canadian border, regardless of class.

 

Yeah, it’s race and class, but all you have to do is look at the young blonde girl in Aruba who disappeared.  That was pretty telling.  Or earlier this year there was the woman who faked a kidnapping when she was supposed to get married.  The public in this country loves stories of damsels in distress, but, you know, it has to be someone like them so they can identify with it.  If it’s a brown person who lives in a cardboard shack, then they don’t care.

— Interview by Adam McKibbin

http://political.detritus.net/juarez/

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