Child Assasination: Two hours from Hollywood
April 27, 2008 by pablo
This is what I read in the LA Times this morning: “The violence has terrorized Tijuana and other cities, where cartel hit men have all but abandoned traditional codes of honor, with brazen daylight attacks and assassinations of children.” What more do you need to know about the rising violence along the Mexico-US border?
I’m sure you’ve heard already about the shootout between drug cartel strongmen and federal authorities, leaving 15 people dead and a whole region once again paralyzed by fear. As sad and tragic as it is, how does the “assassinations of children” not make international headlines?
In the script Libertad, which was penned over a year and a half ago, minus some recent small revisions, we depict an outlaw regime that is so corrupt, so evil that they target children. The one criticism I heard from “studio execs” that read the script was that it was too over the top - “nobody will buy that”, one told me, with a straight face. Now, whether the script is good or not is a purely subjective matter. But what I’ve known, and many people who follow the border know, is that there is no limit to the terror that these people will bring, no bottom to the depths they will descend, to preserve their place in the underworld heirarchy. Had this studio exec, who was a Latino American Producers Conference, know what was really happening two hours from LA, he would have understood that violence against children has - as is - being perpetrated at a staggering rate throughout Latin America.
His solution to my script? Change the story about a displaced Latino immigrant returning to his hometown to help take on poverty and crime, and deal with the guilt about leaving his sibling and country behind to head to the US, and make it about an African-American cop who must bust his gang-banging brother in South Central.
And people wonder why I don’t want anything to do with the studio system? Comments, and others like them is the reason, before I made Runnin’ At Midnite, I stopped taking meetings at agencys and studios. There is a complete ignorance to the pain, the devastation and chaos that is enveloping the southern Border, and it needs to be explored it cinema. It needs to enter the national discussion on a humanitarian level, not an economic one. While the economics of it is important, and perhaps at the root of a lot of it, there is a consistent lack of DIVERSE portrayal of the humanity that is struggling on both side of the border.
I know the LA Times and papers like it run lots of stories about immigration, about drug smuggling, and all those standard topics. But do we know these people? Do we feel their pain, or at least get a sense of what it’s like to be surrounded by trash, yet on the high hill top you can see the lights of San Diego? Do we know what it’s like for a child living in Nogales, parents long gone, to roam the streets, a paint rag to his mouth, killing his pain (along with his brain) by inhaling his narcotic of choice?
Cinema lets you feel that raw emotion that comes with stories of struggle, stories of hope and courage. And we all know emotion moves people to action.
So as you read the LA Times and tales of more murder, I ask you to think back to that studio exec who told me not to write about crime and the border, and to make films relative to the US “concerns”. To the studio exec that told me Americans won’t support films not based in the States, and that I’d have more of a chance of making a gangster film set in South Central than I would about a boy living in squalor in Mexico.
And when you think of that studio exec, also think of those children being “assasinated” in Mexico. What to do about it? One, let’s make sure the country knows it’s happening. And two, lets liberate cinema and the arts from those execs that think along the bottom line of spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets don’t save lives. Spreadsheets don’t instill hope. Spreadsheets don’t care whether a woman dies with her baby in her arms crossing the desert, or a boy loses his mind to sniffing paint and glue.
I think it’s time for a different kind of cinema.
Libertad.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Comments
Translator
