The Virgin of Juárez starring some very well known faces including Minnie Driver and Esai Morales, touches on the incredible story of Juárez in Mexico where over the last thirteen years some four hundred have been raped, mutilated and murdered in some ritualistic way with no one being found responsible, and still the killings continue.

According to the NY Times the story is a drama with a supernatural subplot and was made for just $1 million. It is currently touring festivals and is one of the two Hollywood tales on the harrowing subject.

Bordertown stars Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderas, and is a thriller with a $35 million budget currently in post production.

The scripts for both were read in advance by Artists for Amnesty, the Hollywood arm of Amnesty International, for suggestions about the depiction of the case facts. But based on a screening of the former and the screenplay for the latter, neither movie suggests the scope of the issue.

The tale is a strange one, and I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't turned to it before and I'm more surprised that neither of these tales are turning to the true horror of the story.

Juárez, Mexico's fourth-largest city, with a population of about 1.3 million, is a teeming industrial center dominated by hundreds of multinational assembly plants. Women drawn to Juárez from villages across Mexico provide the majority of the cheap labor, typically for about $6 a day.

As bodies continue to turn up, so have a host of theories. Satanists, organ harvesters and drug cartels have been among the suspects. (Juárez is a major drug conduit to the United States.) So have the sons of wealthy men, who, it has been said, hunt and kill women for sport. Even husbands and boyfriends have been suspected. But so far the only consensus is that a phenomenon once attributed to a single serial killer has become a wider crime wave involving multiple murderers.

"Now it's a monster," the actress Vanessa Bauche said in a telephone interview from Mexico City. "You can cut off one head, and there will appear three more. This is one of the darkest stories in Latin America."

The filmmaking interest seems to have been sparked from an original prize winning documentary:

...a 2001 documentary titled "Señorita Extraviada" ("Missing Young Woman"). The veteran Bay Area filmmaker Lourdes Portillo spent 18 months on the project, which received a special jury prize at Sundance four years ago and was broadcast on PBS in the United States.

There are currently two other documentaries in development, and both set to bring controversy and more questions. One film entitled Ecos de Una Frontera, which follows the tale through Diana Washington Valdez, a reporter at The El Paso Times who has been investigating the murders for some time, is set to name suspects for the continued crimes.

I must admit I've not heard anything about this until now, and it looks like both Hollywood movies will be worth watching out for, if only to give some indication of the events before the documentaries arrive to tell the real story.