Book launch and London Screening - Oct 20th.

We're very proud to announce the release of Mark Aitken's diarised account of filming in a mental asylum run by it's own patients.

Asylum from the Madness - The making of the film 'Dead when I got here'.

'Told with candour, 'Asylum from the Madness' is about learning to dispense with charitable pity. It is about realising how useless our cosseted lives and values are in the face of raw survival. This book is inspiration for living that is less diluted, more essential.' 

Buy a copy here: http://www.deadwhenigothere.org/dvd-book/

Book tickets to the London Screening here:https://ticketing.eu.veezi.com/purchase/8865…

Radio show on London arts station Resonance fm with Mark Aitken reading from the book Asylum from the Madness - the making of the film Dead when I got here.

https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/there-then-hear-now-5th-january-2016/

Doc Connection London hosted a great screening and the DVD launch of Dead when I got here last Monday night. The cinema was packed and everyone stayed for an electrifying Q&A. A video will be posted soon but here's some stills for now...

Director Mark Aitken receiving the award. Here's what they said at the festival...

Made with integrity and compassion, DEAD WHEN I GOT HERE is a privilege to watch. Bathed in light despite the darkness of the subject matter and with a closing image as beautiful as anything you will find in Bresson or Tarkovsky, it is one of the finest examples of documentary filmmaking I've ever seen.

Scott Graham, Writer/Director (SHELL, IONA)

A bold and searing portrait of an unlikely survivor, Mark Aitken's compelling documentary shows that 'life on the edge' can also be right at the heart of humanity.

Richard Warden

Film Curator, Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival

and a link to the awards - http://www.mhfestival.com/news/talking-heads/225-jury-prize-winner-mark-aitken-discusses-dead-when-i-got-here

http://docsdf.org/en/docsdf-se-complace-en-anunciar-a-los-ganadores-de-su-decima-edicion/

Read it here.

http://www.npr.org/2015/07/05/420196929/at-an-asylum-in-juarez-mexico-we-believe-in-hope

Another sell out event and this time with writer Ed Vulliamy, whose book Amexica was the initial inspiration for the film. There's a link to the Q & A with director Mark Aitken here.

A warm and enthusiastic audience attended the first of two screenings last night. Here's one of the responses...

We were fortunate enough to see the US premiere screening of this incredible film here in San Francisco this evening, which tells the tale of a mental asylum in Juarez, run by it's own inmates. One of the most powerful and thought provoking films I have ever seen. Love and hope can spring from the strangest of places.

USA

6.06 - Mesilla Valley, New Mexico

7.06 - Vision en Accion - screening of the film to the patients in the asylum

12/13.06 - San Francisco DocFest

UK

22.06 - Frontline Club, London

http://fronteralist.org/2015/02/27/q-a-with-filmmaker-mark-aitken/



It's been a long year of waiting. Post production was finally completed in October and the film has been entered into 16 film festivals around the world. Festivals act as shop windows so let's hope the programmers like the film. Two TV sales have been made to Dutch and Finnish channels and they'll broadcast sometime in 2015.

In the meantime, a book has been written about the making of the film and a new website is up and running. Please have a look around.

Lastly, here's a short teaser of things to come. The clip shows Josué waiting behind a hotel door for his daughter. They waited 22 years for this moment. I hope we can all wait a little longer to see what happens.

Happy 2015! 

The sound mix on Dead when I got here is complete!  The picture is graded!  3 years and five days of hard work.  The film is now being entered into international festivals for 2015.  You'll be the first to know about screenings, online streams and DVDs.     

On 30th August, Chuck Bowden, my good friend and collaborator on 'Dead when I got here' died. Chuck has been writing about Juárez for the past twenty years, disseminating clarity and compassion on a brutal world made more opaque by official excuses and ignorance. 

His book, 'Murder City' inspired the film and it's with deep sadness that I couldn't complete the work before he passed. I'm privileged to have known the man. 

Chuck said of the film, '...it is about finally feeling the full dimensions of what it means to be human and what it costs to face that meaning.'

Chuck explored these dimensions more than most. 

Below is an exclusive excerpt from my diary during the last shoot at the asylum.

20th December 2012 - Thursday

I asked Josué how he was feeling. He’s had injections of some potent anti-biotic in his backside and he’s now back on his feet. I know I’m coming down with something and I think I know where I got it from. We talked about the weather and then he mentioned that someone had died last night. Apparently death visits in threes here and this is the third in six days.

The police are called and a group of county officers roll up as if from central casting. There’s a tall one, a short one, a fat one with attitude and a thoughtful one. They’re all tooled up with big black sub-machine guns and I’m waiting for them to tell me to stop filming. The only time they ever come here is when they want to dump some human detritus from the street or when someone dies. Death needs to be defined as suspicious or natural. Suspicious is where these guys come in. Where the natural causes lie here, God only knows.

Eventually, the fat officer wants to know why there’s a camera in his face. I explain with Josué backing me and all is well. They’re giving Josué a hard time about people dying here without having any professionals around to run the place. By professionals I assume they mean people like themselves. They work in a city that records eight murders a day and no one is ever arrested. In El Paso just across the line there was one murder last year. They caught the guy.

Josué lets on to the police that he was nearly dead when he arrived here and there’s no one quite as qualified as himself and everyone else here to run this asylum. People are dying because of the cold. They’re weak. They’re mentally ill. The police take their medicine and listen. It’s a beautiful scene.

We then rush off to find the family of the deceased man. None of their phone numbers worked but Josué eventually found an address. He’s very agitated. We pull off the main road, ask directions and arrive at the colonia and meet the mother. Josué shares the burden and the mother cries. She insists on being taken to the asylum to see her son. On the journey back the dossier on the son shivers on the vibrating dashboard. His photo is reflected in the windscreen as an apparition.

Back at the asylum the woman’s son has already been taken away to the morgue. He had lived here since it opened 17 years ago. I guess that made him some sort of mascot. She walks around the patio and then waits at the gate for a lift home. I film her weeping from some ancient well of hopelessness. She seems to get smaller as the shadows get longer around her.

With the knife-edge desert cold the patients hardly come out of their rooms. I film a scene where a door is opened to the main room inhabited by men. They’re passed bowls of soup and they all clamber at the entrance, grunting and growling and clawing at the food. It looks like they haven’t eaten for days yet I know they’re actually receiving seconds after lunch. I think it’s because they’re always worried that every meal might be their last. No matter how regular the servings, nothing will ever change that memory of hunger.

It’s a great single shot and John on sound was mesmerised. I shoot until the door is closed and locked on them. What I don’t see is the herd of dogs licking up spillage at the foot of the doorway. Shots like these are hypnotic and everything vanishes outside the myopia. How I put a shot like this in the film is another thing. I want to convey my encounter with what I saw and not attempt to explain it. It’s a vision of hunger and how it makes people behave. Or maybe it simply serves as a reminder of our almost indestructible instinct to survive. Yet I suspect it will offend many people who will be outraged at how these people are treated. I also know that they would all be dead if they weren’t in this asylum. There aren’t any other options. The people who will complain about this are telling us that they care. This feeds nothing but their own conscience. It’s as if caring is an end in itself. I think we have a lot to learn from these hungry people.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico – the border town now darkly infamous as the world’s most violent city – sits an asylum for the mentally ill and indigent. It’s run by a local man, José Antonio Galván, aka El Pastor – painter, activist and savior. In the words of author Charles Bowden – who has written extensively about the horrors taking place just south of Texas – the man responsible for this small refuge amid chaos and danger, “is an ex-street addict, ex-convict and a full-time healer in a city of pain. He sells love in a city of death, Ciudad Juarez, demonstrably the most violent city on Earth. He expects to be murdered; he prays he will not be tortured first … Now he has begun to paint, and his pictures are not pretty, but they are searing.”  (from an article in City Weekly by Jacob Stringer)

Josué Rosales explains to a forensic doctor how a patient died the previous night during the final shoot last December.  Bare resources offer little comfort to the frail and the desert cold is simply too much.

Six years ago Josué was nearly dead on arrival at the asylum – unable to walk and infested with gangrene.  Now he manages the place and does his best to keep people alive.

Director Mark Aitken offers some insight into the making of the film. 

http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2013/05/28/dead-when-i-got-here-a-filmmakers-adventure-in-juarez/

Dead when I got here has been invited to the pitching forum at Docs Barcelona Festival at the end of May.  235 projects were submitted from 37 countries and 25 were selected.  Some of the films are still at early stages while ours is ready for post-production.  We need financial support to pay for the edit and completion.

Director/Producer Mark Aitken will be pitching the film to broadcasters, distributors, fund managers and sales agents.  Let’s hope they can offer something more than encouragement.

In April 2012 during the second visit to the asylum I asked Josué what his dream for the future might be.  Would he ever leave the asylum?  Did he have any unfinished business?  He told me of his daughter in California.  They hadn’t seen each other in 22 years.  He had no idea where she was.  Josué’s dream was to see her again one day.  He told me it would be sometime soon.  I wrote down her name and told Josué I’d look on the Internet.  I didn’t think I’d have much luck.

On Friday 13th July I was editing the recording of Josué’s dream.  I’d considered going to California to look for his daughter.  Having been deported form the US, Josué wouldn’t be able to accompany me but searching and maybe even finding the daughter could become part of the film.  I also considered the cost and thought better of it.  Let the idea remain as Josué’s dream.  That night I received the following email via the website…

I sent an email straight back and waited up to make a Skype call to LA.  I then had to get hold of Josué.  Somehow I’d become the catalyst for bringing a father and daughter together.  I wanted to be everywhere at once to film their first contact but I had to make do with Skype calls to both of them.  Vanessa said it was all like a dream.  She had been told her father was dead but had never given up searching – even if only for whereabouts of his remains.  Finding him on a film trailer wandering around a mental asylum run by its own patients came as something of a shock.

It took me two months to find the money and time to get over to LA to visit Vanessa.  She filled me in on all the history of her shattered family but showed no signs of resentment.  She was just happy that her father was alive.  We went through old photo albums and she showed me the picture of Josué holding her 22 years ago.  She always carried the picture with her.  We wondered how they could see each other again.  Vanessa didn’t have a passport.  Josué couldn’t enter the US.  I promised that somehow we’d arrange a reunion.