Click for larger view BEIJING, Oct. 10-- Pop diva and actress Jennifer Lopez has put aside her usual glamor and is filming in a hilltop shantytown last week for a gritty movie about the murders of hundreds of women on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Wearing a blond wig, slacks and long-sleeved shirts, Lopez plays a Chicago-based reporter sent to Mexico to investigate the wave of more than 300 slayings in Ciudad Juarez, a violent border city in Chihuahua state across from El Paso, Texas.

Directed by Gregory Nava and co-starring Antonio Banderas,"Bordertown" is being shot in the Mexican city of Nogales on the border with Arizona.

In baking heat Friday, Lopez shot scenes in a shantytown of tin-roofed shacks, set up to look like a Ciudad Juarez neighborhood where many women were killed.

Security was extremely tight for the 35-year-old A-list star.

Heavily armed Mexican police patrolled the set and three bodyguards were there along with her salsa star husband Marc Anthony to protect Lopez every time she stepped out of her sport utility vehicle for the shoots.

Scores of star-struck Mexican film extras shivered in the morning cold Friday, waiting for Lopez' camera call.

"I've only ever seen her in films before, and now getting to work with her is just thrilling," said 53-year-old clothing trader Gustavo Moreno.

"It's kind of a fun experience, though a little scary," said Crystal Zelk, a student from southern Arizona."I play a corpse and it's creepy to think of my family seeing me there in the morgue, dead," she added.

More than 370 women have been beaten, stabbed or strangled to death in Ciudad Juarez since 1993. Around a third of them have been sexually assaulted or raped.

(Source: Shenzhen Daily/Agencies)