The seventh film festival has just finished, to the great credit of its chief executive, Maurice Galway. So what were my own favourites? Well, Mark McLoughlin collaborated with Brian Maguire on a very powerful film on murders of women in Ciudad Juarez, across the US/Mexican border at El Paso. Ironically, next door to El Paso, statistically the safest city in the United States, murder is commonplace in Juarez. Thousands of people in a very short space of time. And no investigations. Girls murdered by their partners, by drug dealers, girls as young as 13 kidnapped, abused, mutilated, and finally killed and dumped in the desert. Sometimes animals have eaten most of their bodies by the time their remains are discovered. And nobody cares, except the mothers. Not even, according to the evidence of this film, the fathers. So the mothers work alone, erecting pink crosses with the word Justicia, in the desperate hope of avenging their daughters' lives, and of stopping the carnage.
It was a pity it was such a black film, I went in such a lighthearted mood, with Carol Cronin, with whom I had had a grand lunch. But it certainly was thought provoking. At one point, Brian Maguire, until recently Professor of Painting in NCAD, said "All good art comes from anger."
I don't agree with that. Do you?
That's the link, if you're interested