Ambra Polidori

On a more sober note, Ambra Polidori shoots raw footage from a car as it is driven through a much darker and denser psychological terrain. In her video El Rapto (The Abduction), the landscape she documents is a route along the outskirts of the Ciudad Juarez. The bleak poverty-stricken town is known internationally as a major producer of snuff films. Many young women and teenagers are kidnapped en route from their day jobs in the town’s maquiladoras, and forced to perform in pornographic films in which they are brutally tortured and rarely survive. Polidori manages to address atrocities using a balanced and restrained visual language. Her viewpoint is paradoxically silent and devoid of preachy sentiment. Accompanied by a mournful musical soundtrack, she focuses the camera on the passing tawdry roadside commercial buildings and warehouses in which these films are produced to feed a voracious global market. It is the side of Mexico that is not commonly seen by the international public and a continuing problem that the country’s political apparatus has addressed ambivalently. At the end of the footage, Polidori chooses to focus on the skeleton of an abandoned horse found at the edges of the town, a powerful metaphor for the young victim lives whose usefulness has been exploited to the point of death.