Customer Reviews

Backyard

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This film is the finest achievement yet in terms of explaining what is going on in Ciudad Juárez with the femicides. There was a documentary made a few years back--"On the Edge"--and it had its good points, but "Backyard" actually explains much more clearly what forces have coalesced to create such horrific conditions in the border town of Ciudad Juárez: global corporations (including the US, of course) seeking super-cheap labor, a depleted economy in Mexico that brings thousands of poor rural people to the cities in search of work, drug cartels, corruption that characterizes all levels of politics and the police, angry men who resent all the women who work so cheaply in the maquiladoras (factories), and poverty. Thanks, NAFTA: job well done!

It is a docudrama: it's fictional, but outlines all of the possible and likely motives behind all of the torture, rape, mutilation and murder of women in CJ. It will open your eyes.

Backyard is a brutally difficult film to watch, primarily because it's so realistic and hits so close to home. Nominally, Backyard is about hundreds of poor Mexican women murdered in Juarez over the past decade, but it also raises very basic questions, such as the value of human life and how that value should be measured.

For the indolent and corrupt officials at the top of the police force in Juarez, the value of a young woman's life or, for that matter, the value of any human life, is largely a matter of political calculus. Much as with the highest Baltimore police officials in the HBO series The Wire, the value of life is expressed mainly in negative terms, the cost of the dead: the more murders the worse the statistics; the worse the statistics the more pressure from politicians to make the statistics look better ... "juking the stats" is the operative concept. The stats can make of break careers, and even persuade local subsidiaries of multinational corporations to relocate out of fear that their image will be tarnished. The murdered are most valuable when their bodies are not found.

Juarez is thoroughly integrated into the international economy. As a result, Mexican, American, and Japanese government officials and corporate leaders can easily calculate the hourly dollar value of a Third World female worker in a common currency. They do just that in the comfortable office of the Governor of Chihuahua, the state in which Juarez is located, with the range going from high of $1.10 in Mexico to a low of $0.83 in Thailand. Trouble is, the values assigned to women workers are costs to the multinational corporations, so again the numbers are best construed in negative terms. Mexico can't compete with Thailand because Mexico's labor market values women too highly.

The Mexico that we see in Backyard looks like a very poorly tended landfill, a dump for used and cast off American products, there for hapless scavengers to pick over, but really doing little more than providing a background of ugly clutter and environmental degradation. It doesn't take a sociologist to figure out that in a place like Juarez life will be cheap, women will be playthings, sex will be sadistic, and adhering to conventional rules of Western morality will seem irrational and self-defeating. After all, what have you got to lose?

A brutally indifferent world begets brutally indifferent people. When people cease to be valued as human beings -- ends in themselves -- and are reduced to monetary equivalents, all bets are off. Why not kill women, or men or children, or otherwise indulge your basest impulses. So we get the ongoing tragedy of the killing of Juarez women, repeated from place to place across the world. A fitting tribute to the economic, political, social, and cultural costs of so-called free market globalization.

Whoever is interested in the history and background of those killings that still happen in Juarez, Mexico, especially of women - should see that film!!
Especially grim - and not recommended for younger audience - but realistic!!

This is by far the best movie about the Juarez, Mexico mass murders of women and girls. It is well acted and disturbing. I hope that authorities will catch all the perps, whether they be serial killers, snuff porn weirdos or government officials. I plan on reading alot more about these catastrophic events and following all updates on this case.

watched it solely for Jimmy Smits but enjoyed the story line. Prefer watching it in Spanish with English subtitles because in English the voices never match the character.