Acceso usuarios
Sohyun Lee
Lourdes Portillo's Señorita extraviada/Missing Young Woman (2001) is known as a documentary about the extensive killing of women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Here I study how the architecture and the content of the film betray the conventions of traditional documentary, creating a hybrid text intertwined with the noir variation of the detective genre. This documentary avoids an objective representation of the Juarez killings, but plays instead with the whodunnit formulas or the meta-detective genre as it develops a particular investigation that not only traces the mysterious crimes but also verifies the reliability of official investigations. This margin-situated perspective between contradictory discursive registers turns the film into an ironic commentary on the social context that is allowing the femicide in Ciudad Juarez to go unpunished. And eventually, this unsettling investigation is a gesture of mourning for the missing and forgotten women
