La Cazadora

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Note of intent

Diana’s statement after the murders transformed common killings, the kind people expect in Juarez, into a warning. Ordinary and epic, tragic and inspiring, impotent and empowered, she reveals the contradictions between the person that she is and the one she wants to become. Embodying her struggle against external antagonists, internal demons, and the competing roles in her life, it informs my conception of La Cazadora more than anything else and by evoking her fear, desperation, and frustration I hope to show the inevitability of her choice.

Synopsis

On August 28, 2013, a middle-aged Mexican woman wearing a blonde wig boarded a bus in Ciudad Juarez and shot the driver six times. Twenty-four hours later she boarded another bus and killed the driver. That weekend she issued a statement claiming responsibility, calling out a city that stood by complicit while bus drivers sexually assaulted factory workers on their way to work. She signed it “Diana, Huntress of Bus Drivers.” In La Cazadora, Diana storms onto the scene with the killing of the first driver, calculated and merciless, but over the course of the next 24 hours we get to know Luz, the factory worker and mother behind the wig and the gun, as she navigates her everyday responsibilities post killing and plans for the next. By the end of this day Luz must choose between protecting her 13 year-old daughter or carrying out Diana’s plan to make Juarez safer for all women.

Visual concept

Diana’s actions are dark but the quotidian nature of Luz’s day defines the emotional, visual language of the film. Open and light, naturalism and handheld camerawork remind us that though we see, we don’t always perceive. The dangers of this world are woven into the fabric of everyday life and villains don’t lurk in dark corners. Infinitely more terrifying, they walk amongst us as much a part of the landscape as the scrub that dots the desert. As the opening image of the Chihuahua desert suggests: everything in this world hides in plain sight.