Cinélatino: today's cinema in Mexico, different perspectives
The mother courage of the film "Without a particular sign" by Fernanda Valadez, a first feature film whose release has been announced for several months ... © http://www.cinelatino.fr/
Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec
8 mins
The Cinélatino festival gives pride of place to young Mexican filmmakers whose camera delves into the wounds of a country torn apart by violence.
Violence of corruption, exploitation of work, inequalities that push to emigrate, gender violence, mafia violence of drug trafficking, violence of disappearances, bodies found in mass graves ... Several films and meetings illustrate this theme and the different ways of portraying it in this new online edition of the Rencontres de Toulouse.
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How to tell about the violence in Mexico?
How to film it in all its complexity and for which audience?
These are the questions that fed the round table on
contemporary Mexican cinema
proposed by the Rencontres de Toulouse and which can be seen on the festival's Youtube channel.
Fernanda Valadez, Carlos Lenin and Bruno Santamaria participated, three young filmmakers born in the 1980s.
Sin señas particulares
, (No particular sign) the film by Fernanda Valadez, which we discovered at the San Sebastian festival and in the Cinélatino selection in 2020, tells the story of a mother who went in search of her son who emigrated to the north and of which she has no news.
A quest / investigation in the form of a
road movie
through Mexico and a first award-winning feature film, which we are impatiently awaiting the release in France.
A film born from my story, Fernanda tells us, I was born in the state of Guanajuato, in the center of the country, a state which provides large contingents for emigration.
And one of the starting points of the film was the discovery of mass graves in the state of Tamaulipas, in the north, in the years 2010-2011.
In
La paloma y el lobo
(The dove and the wolf), also selected last year at Cinélatino (and presented this year like the previous film in the Pearls section of
the online festival
), the director Carlos Lenin tells in this first feature film how difficult it is to love in a country so marked by violence.
If this, criminal violence, remains out of focus, it nonetheless permeates all romantic and social relationships, the landscape, the air that the couple breathes.
Originally from northern Mexico, from Linares, Carlos Lenin also presents in competition this time the short film
El sueño mas largo que recuerdo
with still violence in the background: Tania's father, the narrator, disappeared, taken away by the police in 2008. The nightmares of the young girl and the quest for the mother in the desert sequence the film and blend together;
the lights of dream and reality merge.
Tania decides to leave, to flee the nightmares of her nights and days.
“
They want us to leave and forget,
” a neighbor reproaches him.
These two films are directly inspired by my experience, explains Carlos Lenin: drug trafficking violence or political violence.
He himself was kidnapped and owed his release to the fact that one of his tormentors was a childhood friend who recognized him.
Same questioning from Bruno Santamaria, the third guest of the round table.
He was also keen to work on violence and the fear it engenders and filmed for three years in a village in the north of the country.
He has made a shift in his work from social violence to intimate violence: the behavior of individuals, children in this case, how is it conditioned by the contexts of violence in which they evolve.
Cosas que no hacemos
, a documentary, tells the story of little Arturo who refuses to grow up.
Arturo, who becomes Dayanara, will succeed in confiding his secret to those around him, but will not dare to assert his identity as a woman until much later, after having left his environment, his village and found a job.
Our generation is very marked by these phenomena of violence, explains Fernanda Valadez, and they are widely explored by the cinema.
This is the case of
Nuevo Orden
, the latest film by Michel Franco, confirmed director.
C
ourned in Venice,
it is part of the Cinélatino feature film competition.
When social and political violence provokes an explosion of the Mexican pressure cooker, a bloody revolution followed by a terrifying counter-revolution.
A punchy dystopia which should soon be released in theaters in France.
How to film violence off the beaten track?
Systemic violence in Mexico has become a storytelling topic in itself, insists Carlos Lenin.
It is even an inexhaustible source of stories, scenarios, songs, even with
narco-corridos
, a culture in a nutshell.
►
To read also
: “El Chapo” Guzman, commercial phenomenon of the year in Mexico
During the round table, the three filmmakers are questioned about their way of filming what could appear to be infilmable.
We expect some cinematic treatment from us;
we expect you to film in such a way, at such a distance from the subjects, with such a rhythm (necessarily sustained like the crackle of machine guns), etc., continues Carlos Lenin.
And for us directors, it is sometimes difficult to escape these pre-established patterns.
And he tells how he had to impose that in his film, his main character, a worker who "turns badly", be filmed with his gaze lost in the vague.
As if a worker could not be contemplative, should only be a body at work in a film.
To reduce the characters to tools for staging violence is to deprive them of their humanity.
"
We cannot be reduced to this violence,
" he insists.
Moreover, filming violence in a hyper realistic way has the paradoxical effect of fictionalizing it, of fooling the viewer, hence the use of dreamlike or symbolic sequences to force them to distance themselves from the subject.
This is one of the common points of the films presented by the three filmmakers of the round table.
Despite the endemic violence, people (and characters) continue to love, to invent lives.
And in the three films, the camera lingers on the bodies, the landscapes, the light.
The shots breathe and give flesh to the characters and their emotions.
"Fauna", a true-false thriller
Putting the story into perspective is also the point of Nicolas Pereda who explains in an
interview his point in
Fauna
, a
film presented in the feature film competition.
Nicolas Pereda, a regular at the Toulouse festival, has built a film with bifurcations with several stories that separate.
A couple is visiting the north of the country and north equals violence in the imagination of the people of the capital.
Violence is constructed by fictional images for many Mexicans, explains Nicolas Pereda.
Especially since it mainly affects rural populations, the poor, migrants, reminded Fernanda Valadez.
Fauna's
couple
therefore arrive with their heads full of images, born from TV series, fiction films, literature, of the style "
the bad guys all have big hats and the accent of the North
", ironically Pereda, who goes apply to dynamite this representation in a clever and confusing film.
A media construction that suits the State very much, accuses the director, when in fact, the narcos and the State are one: they are elected or ex-elected, generals and high-ranking army officers. .
“
Nosotros latino-americanos creemos en Dios porque somos el diablo
”, we Latin Americans believe in God because we are the devil, launches a provocative Carlos Lenin.
If they are not the devil, these young directors nourish their work with this theme of violence but by questioning it, by deconstructing it.
In her next feature film Fernanda Valadez questions what it would take for young people who grew up in a context of violence to have another life and works on the story of an orphan of narco-terrorism.
She questions the notion of fate.
Carlos Lenin is him on the story of a homicide that affected his family and Bruno Santamaria on a fiction inspired by a family drama.
Suffice to say that these filmmakers have not finished scratching where it hurts.
► These five films are only part of the selection of Mexican films, others are to be discovered
► The website of the
Cinelatino
festival
and
the platform to watch the films
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