- What do you think a production of snuff movies in contemporary culture indicates about it? Namely, this type of movie has started to appear widely only when the equipment was made cheaper. Do you know it existed even before video times or it is rather a product of the contemporary society that has started to consume death?

The first information about snuff films I found, is from the 20´s in the United States, from Hollywood. It was shot on 16mm. I don´t think snuff films are a product of video technology, I think video technology has made them accessible. They are easier to make and to distribute, and Internet is a fertile medium for that purpose. Unfortunately, I don´t think "societies need to consume dead", as you put it, is a product of this era, either. History shows that "dead spectacles", have even been popular in most societies. The Romans and their Coliseum, could be an example. Do I think this says something about human kind? Yes I do, but that’s an entirely different discussion.

- It seems that there were more of snuff movies recorded in Mexico than discussions of these women who got killed? Has your film that actually enters into the genre and talks on the problem made some differences?

The other American dream , the short we made, talks about a problem in a town called Ciudad Juárez, that is in the border of México and the United States. By the time we started production there had been more than 350 women murdered, and more than 500 disappeared. In México this women are known as "las muertas de Juárez", the dead women of Juárez, and the first one appeared in 1993. We started production in 2004. Eleven years after the first one. Our short is not specifically about snuff film making, although that happens in the short, our film wanted to address the bigger issue of "las muertas de Juárez". By the time we had finished our investigation there were 8 reasons for the murdered women: drug trade, human smuggling, violent sexual crimes, passion crimes, satanic religious cults, organ smuggling, snuff films, and I´m forgetting one. There are people in jail for committing all this sorts of crimes, and there are dead women that were victims of this crimes. When we were writing the script, we tried to include all the reasons for the "muertas de Juárez". To my knowledge, snuff films accounts to a very small percentage of the "muertas de Juárez". This is determined by the type of dead they had, and I had the chance to read the forensic reports, in which the doctors explained how they died.

When we finished the film, we send it out to a lot of organizations based in Ciudad Juárez, and in Chihuahua, the state to which Ciudad Juárez belongs, at the calling of one of the mothers who had lost her 16 year old girl to the crimes in Juárez. They had been trying to generate a social conscience in our country for years, against the crimes, and she, along with other mothers who have an organization for this purpose, thought our film could help in the diffusion of the problem. That is the reason why we made it, so we were happy to comply. And they achieved their goal, the crimes were recognized by all the society, there were lots of discussions about it, about the horrors, and the government had to take a hand in stopping them. Although the crimes of Juárez have not completely stopped, they have been almost eradicated.

- I've heard the jury has went out on one of screenings. Somehow this makes me to conclude that not only that there are people consuming violent deaths in real, but also there are others that neglect that happens, turning their head away. What do you find worst?

You are asking me to make a moral judgment, and to assign guilt, and that is something I'm not prepared to do. But we have a saying in México, I´ll put it in Spanish and try to translate it: Tanta culpa tiene el que mata la vaca, como el que le jala la pata", in English it says something like: the one that holds the cow is just as guilty as the one who kills it. If you want to assign guilt, I think we are all guilty, as a society, for not stopping this sooner.

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Enrique Arroyo (Spanish only) is a Mexican director.

Upcoming interview with Anur Hadžiomerspahić on the project Identify, done in collaboration with Ajna Zlatar.

Before the official start of the Victims' symptom, planned for early 2008, a serial of interviews will be published on this blog. Besides commenting, you can send your proposals with questions or full interviews that would shape the upcoming discussion.