Mark Aitken is an award-winning filmmaker whose works include Forest of Crocodiles and Until When You Die. His latest, Dead When I Got Here, focuses on the Visión en Acción asylum in Juárez.  For more information, visit his website

It’s the only place I know in Juarez that gives me real hope- Charles Bowden

Photo via Twitter

By Virginia Isaad

Ed Vulliamy’s “Amexica, War Along the Border” and the late Charles Bowden’s “Murder City, Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields” inspired you to make this film. What was it about their works that was so inspiring? 

I read Charles Bowden’s, Murder City in 2011. The book is about Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, a city that frequently trumps Mogadishu for being the most violent in the world. Juárez sits in the epicentre of global free trade, just across a line from the US. The most lucrative trade is of drugs and arms, although the clothes we wear, machines we use and people we employ are also traded. The trading causes the line between these two countries to be very porous. But we insist on the line. On one side there is the developed world. We’re told the other side is yet to be developed. On both sides, we insist on this line defining us in relation to them.

There is a character in Murder City called Miss Sinaloa. A diva driven crazy after being gang raped in Juárez by police and dumped in a mental asylum in the desert run by its own patients. The crazy place, where the lunatics are running the asylum.

I want to know more about these people from the city of death who look at each other and ask what they can do to help.

I visited the asylum in the desert. I meet Pastor José Antonio Galván, an evangelical street preacher from Juárez. I don’t share the Pastor’s beliefs but he is one of those believers who works with the problems. He isn’t waiting for a solution that promises to eradicate whatever sets us apart from them. His diagnosis is simple: people are in trauma. The way forward is for them to help each other as best they can. This is a beleaguered promised land populated by outcasts. An asylum from the madness.

What was the most surprising thing you learned while making this film?

The facts account for an unlikely truth. A city of 1.5 million where eight people are murdered every day with impunity should not herald people of light. Yet here they are – generous, kind, loving, crazy people who allowed me to make a film about them. They set an example for us all.

What was the most challenging aspect?

See above in terms of goals. I worked very hard and to shape a complex story and place into something that wasn’t going to scare an audience away or make them feel disgusted. Mental illness, death and Juárez are difficult subjects to broach in a film.

How did you orchestrate the reunion of Josué Rosales with his daughter? What was that experience like for you?