Artist in Person

(Señorita Extraviada). Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, has a secret: since 1994 over two hundred young women have disappeared from its streets, most being discovered weeks or months later, murdered and abused, their bodies dumped in a desert that provides few clues. Bay Area filmmaker Lourdes Portillo investigates why this is happening, and who, or what, is to blame: an Egyptian national, a gang called "the rebels," bus drivers, narco-traffickers, the police, the military, U.S. nationals, or the multinational factories where the women worked? As Portillo reveals a legacy of disinformation, incompetence, and corruption with a forceful, slowly building anger, Ciudad Juarez's dirty secret spirals into a truly horrific nightmare. Everyone, and everything, is suspect. Yet while rumors swirl and officials dally the women continue to disappear: in eighteen months of filming, Portillo states, over fifty women were killed. Powerful, alarming, and frequently heartbreaking, this is her plea, and psalm, for them.