Synopses & Reviews
The British photographer Malcolm Venville has made a searing photographic record of a deranged reality. Complementing Venville's photographs is a series of astonishingly candid interviews with the women of Casa X by the well-known Mexican writer Amanda de la Rosa. These are the portraits and testimonies of thirty-five survivors of the monster of the City, with much to say about life in a slum in Latin America: about the Mexico that horrifies, about sex, poverty, love, and the darkest side of human nature. One night in Mexico City, Carmen Muñoz, sex worker, was roaming the streets looking for customers. Unexpectedly, she found two colleagues, both over sixty years old, sleeping on the street, covered by newspapers. After almost forty years of giving service to butchers, porters, refuse collectors and criminals, they were now long forgotten by their families and society. Carmen was confronted with what would be her own fate, like most women of her profession. Striving for dignity for all of them, she organised her colleagues and led a group that resolved to find a home where they could spend their last days in safety and warmth. In 2006, after twelve years of work, and with the support of Mexican intellectuals and artists, the government gave them a seventeenth-century mansion, where Carmen founded Casa Xochiquetzal - Casa X. Around sixty women, all over fifty years old, receive shelter, food, and medical and psychological care. This is not just a retirement home - most of the women who live there still walk the streets. But Casa X is the only refuge for prostitutes in Latin America. Casa X is located in the heart of the notorious district of Tepito. Although only eight blocks from the historic centre of Mexico City, Tepito is a micro-universe, where life is lived in a unique fashion. For nearly 500 years it has been a place of impunity, crime, smuggling, violence and prostitution. The neighbourhood did not submit to the Aztec Empire, or to the Spanish conquistadors, or to the current authorities. Tepito has an identity that goes beyond its boundaries. It has its own social organisation, myths, heroes, slang, and even its own local deity, La Santa Muerte (Holy Death). The women of Casa X are stuck at the bottom of the ladder of this world, and keeping the memories of it in their bodies.
About the Author
Malcolm Frank Venville is a British photographer and film director. Venville was the child of deaf parents. He was, in the words of his uncle, "caught in some no-man's land between the deaf world and the hearing world." Venville attended Solihull College (1981-83) and Polytechnic of Central London (1983-86), graduating with honors with a BA in film, video, and photographic arts. Breaking out with a campaign for Wrangler in 1991, he became an acclaimed and sought-after advertising and fashion photographer. In 1992, he began directing commercials, starting with an advertisement for Audi. Venville has three books of photography. Layers (2003) is a collection of Venville's advertising, celebrity, fashion, and personal photography. Lucha Loco (2006) is a collection of over a hundred portraits of lucha libre wrestlers taken on a 2005 trip to Mexico. His third monograph The Women of Casa X, portraits of elderly prostitutes from Casa Xochiquetzal in the infamous Tepito district of Mexico City, was published by Schilt Publishing in 2013. His short film career began with Silent Film (1997), an 11 minute film documenting the romance of his deaf parents.[5] He also directed a pair of short documentaries about actresses in small memorable roles: Remembering Sister Ruth (1997), about actress Kathleen Byron, who played the disturbed nun Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus (1947), and the 15 minute Remembering Miss Torso (2004), about actress Georgine Darcy, who played the voluptuous neighbor Miss Torso in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). Venville initially turned down a number of offers to direct feature films, including Coyote Ugly, because he wished his feature film debut to be a planned movie called Deaf Road, about his uncle's attempts to lose his virginity in Tangiers. It would be entirely in sign language, which Orlando Bloom had pledged to learn to star in the film. Venville's feature film debut was 44 Inch Chest (2009), a gangster film starring Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and Ian McShane. It reunited the writers and some of the cast of an earlier British gangster film, Sexy Beast (2000). He also directed Henry's Crime (2010), a romantic comedy starring Keanu Reeves, James Caan, and Vera Farmiga.