Hayley Surgenor

Irinea Buendia, Mother of Mariana Buendia victim of femicide

has been fighting for the last ten years. 

Today in Mexico every eighteen-seconds a woman gets raped, every four hours a woman vanishes and daily eight women die due to gender violence.

The State of Mexico is home to an undetermined number of extremely violent killings of women that involve rape or mutilation, and are usually never solved. These crimes have gone unchecked in this state for more than two decades.

Feminist author Diana E. H. Russell is one of the early pioneers of the term femicide or feminicide and she defines it as a sex-based hate crime in which males intentionally kill females (women or girls) because they are females.

We are a team of filmmakers, some with experience in independent filmmaking and others from the student body of The VCA. With your help will be able to put WE VANISH into production, allowing us to give a voice to those who have been silenced. 

WE VANISH is a form of protest against the Government's systematic oppression in which women in the State of Mexico are blamed for their own violent deaths and where justice seems impossible to achieve. 

Women protesting after the murder of  Mara a 19-year-old girl killed by a taxi driver. 

WE VANISH is a political drama set in the State of Mexico where violence against woman has been normalised. A young mother with nothing to lose will fight to get justice for her teenage daughter whose body has been recently found tortured, mutilated and dumped on the street. Due to the police negligence and indifference, she puts her own life in danger and embarks on a journey to get legal justice and send the people responsible to jail.

Astrid Dominguez: Writer & Director 

Astrid is a writer & director originally from the State of Mexico. She started her career as a director in 2014 when she moved back to Mexico City from New York where she has now directed more than seventy commercials.

After a year and a half as an advertising Director in Mexico, Astrid decided to go back to film and keep enriching her education. In 2015 she was accepted into an MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne Australia, where she is currently developing her graduate short film based on the epidemic of gender violence that is currently happening in the State of Mexico. She will be graduating from The VCA in February 2018 with a Masters in Film and TV as a writer/director.

As a filmmaker, her recent work has focused mainly on female subjectivity and the various forms in which identity and reality are shaped within individuals through their cultural and social circumstances. 

Hayley Surgenor: Australian Producer

Hayley has a Bachelor in Film and Television from Swinburne University in Melbourne and has recently completed a Masters in Film Producing at The Victorian College of the Arts. She has produced a number of short films both in Australia and Internationally which have collected awards and screened at various film festivals around the world (St Kilda Film Festival, Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, World Fest Remi Winner, California Film Awards). 

Aníbal Barco Martinez: Director of Photography 

Motivated by creating challenging images, Anibal focused his professional development as a cinematographer on independent and experimental projects that have a social impact.  As Director of Photography, he has worked in several short films documentaries that have been selected in national and international film festivals.  Anibal is also passionate about photoperiodism and editorial photography. He has participated in national publications such as El País, Sumplemento Tomo for El Universal, Expansión Magazine, Editorial Travesías Medios, Chilango and international publications such as Hemispheres Magazine and Bloomberg.

Sandra De Silva De La Torre: Mexican Associate Producer 

With eleven years of experience in the film industry, Sandra graduated from the prestigious National Film and Television School in the United Kingdom with a Masters in Cinematography. She has worked on projects such as The Graveddigger's tale, Tea & Cake, Chaa kuvi Kuiya cha'nu, Cross Arts, Cresta among others.  Sandra's work has taken her all over te world, from Canada, London, Ireland, Switzerland and Mexico as a DOP. She is currently a member of the International Collective of Female Cinematographers and the founder of Claquta Mexicana: The Collective Crew.

Your support will allow us to contribute towards:

Mexico's political climate as a  major challenge: 

Mexico is a nation where affluence, poverty, natural splendour and urban blight rub shoulders. Despite possessing the second largest economy in Latin America, prosperity remains a dream for many Mexicans and the socio-economic gap continues to widen. Drug cartels and security forces battle for control of many Mexican neighbourhoods and violence flows into the everyday lives of the populace.

Mexico has been shaped by economic deprivation and criminal activity and many believe the situation has declined further in the preceding decade, with tens of thousands losing their lives in the last ten years alone.  This has lead to a state of affairs where for many Mexicans corruption has become synonymous with governance. A very serious and overlooked side effect of the gang related violence in Mexico is the increase in violence against women and girls nationwide.

We Vanish aims to increase the visibility of the issue of femicides. Corruption within the Mexican legal system has created a situation where there are insufficient measures to guarantee the safety of women and girls and to provide justice to the victims of crime and their families. We are vigilant in ensuring our cast and crew’s safety through standard measures in terms of OH&S but because of the nature of the project local governments do not want the issues raised to be highlighted. This requires us to remain aware of the political climate to ensure our cast and crew remain safe from pre- to post-production.

The goal of our campaign is to raise $15000. Most of the expenses will be covered by our experienced and passionate crew who believe in our vision but we need your help getting us over the line. With your help we intend to amplify the voice of mothers all over Mexico who are putting their lives at risk every day to achieve justice for their daughters.

On September  2017 Mexico was hit by two earthquakes 

On 19 September 2017 a second earthquake struck central Mexico. This one had an estimated magnitude of 7.1 and caused the area to shake for about 20 seconds. The earthquake caused damage in the Greater Mexico City area, including the collapse of more than 80 buildings. People were killed by the earthquake and related building collapses, including 900 related deaths in Mexico City alone and more than 6,000 were injured.

Ground zero was where the film community in Mexico is centred. Lives were lost and thousands of people lost their homes including members of our amazing crew. The army was focused on providing aid to Chiapas after the first earthquake and civilians had to organise themselves to help rescue survivors from under the rubble of collapsed buildings. The whole crew made themselves available to assist those affected with their time and resources. This was an extreme challenge we never expected to encounter and the production had to be suspended for 3 weeks. 

These events humbled us all greatly and we are all extremely grateful to have survived them. Some of our crew remain homeless at the time of writing this, and many other friends and relatives know people who have lost their lives or homes. Despite witnessing this calamitous and tragic time in Mexico’s history, our whole crew remain dedicated to persevering through because we share a belief that this story needs to be told.

Civilians helping rescue survivors from a building in La Condesa.

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