18 minutes
I wanted to make an 18-minute short film
about a guy who was kidnapped
by the Mexican cartel.
He was pistol-whipped for three days,
watched his friend get gang-raped,
was drugged with a dirty needle
while they beat the crap out of him.
Then, they just turned him loose.
He wandered the streets of Ciudad Juárez with blood all over him,
pissed off because he didn’t have his camera with him.
That was the first thing they took after they grabbed him
from his shitty little apartment with one bed, a round table and a chair.
He talked to the FBI.
They said he couldn’t go back to Ciudad Juárez.
He didn’t know where to go.
He had no money and no camera.
The camera was his lifeline.
He was a photographer.
He took photos of people the world doesn’t care about.
Hookers, drug dealers, street gangs,
kids pushing street carts bigger than themselves with no shoes.
He sees them.
He doesn’t drag them into a studio,
he just becomes them in their bars, streets, beds and an occasional half-burned chair
tossed with clumsy precision into the street.
The people in his photographs look through him to us.
They proudly tell us who they are.
They know we’re scared of them.
We can’t look away.
He sees himself in them.
He feels safe.
Happy.
Connected.
It’s a far cry from a kid born in Santa Monica
and raised in the icy tundra of Detroit.
He went to Guatemala after he was kidnapped.
He drank all of Guatemala City.
He didn’t teach photography anymore, but he still took photos.
They were his lifeline.
His only drug.
The one thing that made him feel real.
He met a 15-year-old hooker-in-waiting named Marta.
She took him home one night on her rusted mint-green Vespa
after another night of drinking all of Guatemala City.
She wore a hot pink tank top with blue jean short shorts
and purple flip flops that said Adidas on the side.
She never braided her hair. She liked it messy.
She told him he scared her.
This was ironic to him because, as she told him,
he was clinging to her tiny waist for dear life
as she ran every red light in Guatemala City at 2 am.
She said she wanted him to be her only job
so she wouldn’t have to be a hooker.
He said he didn’t get involved with his subjects
but would pay her to take her photo.
She said that didn’t feel like work to her.
She left him there in his new shitty apartment in Guatemala City
so drunk he could barely stand up.
She texted him the next day and asked again
if he would be her only client.
He still said no.
She asked him if he thought people would pay for rides home from the bar
if they were too drunk.
He said yes.
She felt like that was honest work.
He never saw her again after that.
A few months later, Kiki the bartender
told him Marta had moved across town to the tourist areas
and was giving drunk Americans rides home on her mint-green scooter.
She wore her hair in a braid now.
I never made this film. But I wanted to.
