Juarez mayor calls for boycott of ‘Sicario’ film, considers suing producers

The mayor of Ciudad Juarez is calling for a boycott of the film “Sicario” which is set for a wide release this Friday.

Sicario is Spanish for hitman. The film opened in a handful of cities on Sept. 18.

According to ABC-7’s news partners at XHIJ-TV, Juarez Mayor Enrique Serrano recently told media he wasn’t against the movie but rather protesting the way producers portrayed the city in it.

He said that if the movie told viewers this was the way it was in the past, then he would have no objections but Hollywood producers keep portraying the city as a violent place.

Serrano says he has worked very hard to help the city overcome that image and it isn’t like how it was was a few years ago.

Serrano went on to say the only way to fight the current depiction of Juarez is to boycott “Sicario” and he is considering suing the makers of the film.

“Sicario” stars Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin and has been named one of the 30 most anticipated films of Oscar season, according toVariety.

The film and its stars received a seven-minute standing ovation after it debuted at theCannes Film Festivalthis spring.

“In the lawless border area stretching between the U.S. and Mexico, an idealistic FBI agent Kate (Blunt) is enlisted by an elite government task force official (Brolin) to aid in the escalating war against drugs. Led by an enigmatic consultant with a questionable past (Del Toro), the team sets out on a clandestine journey forcing Kate to question everything that she believes in order to survive,” states the synopsis on the film’s official website.

All three actors, the film’s director, and screenplay writer were interviewed for a feature in the New York Times.

“I saw it as a war movie,” Taylor Sheridan, the film’s screenplay writer, told the New York Times. “And at some point it becomes not so much what was the war about, but should we be fighting it this way?”

Read the full New York Times article athttp://nyti.ms/1OsY0b9

Sheridan told the Los Angeles Times he wrote the story with the goal of upending preconceived notions about the war on drugs — a purely evil cartel on the one hand and right-minded Americans trying to stop them on the other.

“I wanted to explore the modern American frontier and what it looks like,” Sheridan told the LA Times. “A lot of people call it a cartel movie. But the cartels of course are just a progression of demand. If you remove them all tomorrow, identical entities would pop up in their place.”

Read the full Los Angeles Times article athttp://lat.ms/1KXuefK

More On “Sicario”

Watch Deadline Hollywood’s interviews with Blunt, Del Toro, Brolin, and the director athttp://bit.ly/1Ot0TbV Watch 1st official trailer athttp://bit.ly/1HLOXfP Watch 2nd official trailer athttp://bit.ly/1UDcJ54 Featurette on Blunt’s character, Kate Macerhttp://bit.ly/1OsZF0s Clip of raid in filmhttp://bit.ly/1NYh6c7 While the movie is set in El Paso and Juarez it was filmed in Albuquerque, according to the movie’s IMDB page. Below is the synopsis of the film from the officialwebsite.
“In the lawless border area stretching between the U.S. and Mexico, an idealistic FBI agent Kate (Blunt) is enlisted by an elite government task force official (Brolin) to aid in the escalating war against drugs. Led by an enigmatic consultant with a questionable past (Del Toro), the team sets out on a clandestine journey forcing Kate to question everything that she believes in order to survive.”
“Sicario” is a Lionsgate presentation, a Black Label Media presentation, a Thunder Road production, a Denis Villeneuve film.