Mexico city (ap) – after its successful tour of international festivals, fernanda valadez’s “sin signs” opens on thursday in movie theaters in her home country, mexico.
Starring Mercedes Hernández, the film portrays the tireless search for Magdalena, a mother who decides to leave everything behind to enter the dangerous north of the country in order to find her missing son. In his journey between towns and desolate places he meets Miguel (David Illescas), a young man recently deported from the United States who becomes his companion.
“Sin Señas Particulars” delves into the thriller genre with a mix of professional actors from Mexico City and young people from rural communities familiar with the migration it portrays.
The film follows the recent murder of two real-life missing-seekers. The wave of violence, which generally had not touched family members, seems to be crossing that line with increasing frequency.
“It is a social fragility and vulnerability that has been taking root,” Valadez said in a recent video-call interview from Mexico City. “It is a situation that has been spreading, it is not just a social class, it is not just a region of the country, migrants of course are a very fragile link in the social structure, but it is a degradation that has been spreading , like a cancer that has been advancing ”.
At the end of July, activist José Nicanor Araiza Dávila, who had been searching for his missing son since 2018, was kidnapped and found dead in Zacatecas. A couple of weeks earlier, in Sonora, Aranza Ramos, 28, who had been searching for her missing husband for a year, was kidnapped and shot to death. In May, activist Javier Barajas Piña, another search engine, was gunned down in Guanajuato. Since the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador began in December 2018, 69 human rights and environmental activists have been assassinated in Mexico.
Hernández recently played another heartbreaking role in the Netflix miniseries “Somos”, about a massacre that occurred in a town on the border with the United States at the hands of organized crime, as the mother-in-law of a young man unjustly imprisoned and used to commit the slaughter.
“I feel very happy to play two women so strong that without having a speech, an academic level, with their own way of acting they speak of the cosmogony they have, of the vision they have of the world,” she said. “They are women. that they are empowering and making the world move, that makes us feel alive and feel indignation, feel courage and in that sense react ”.
“These works consistently show what I think and that is that violence should not exist, that those who suffer the most should be treated in the first instance,” he said.
“Sin señas particulars”, a Mexican-Spanish co-production, was written and produced by Valadez and Astrid Rondero based on the short film “400 maletas” by Valadez, nominated for the Ariel Award for Mexican Cinema and the Student Oscar in 2015. It is the first film de Valadez, a graduate of the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica de México.
After receiving the Films in Progress Award for post-production at the San Sebastián Festival, in addition to the audience award and a special jury award for best script upon its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, “Sin señas sociales” began a tour of international festivals that earned him awards for best first feature at the Lima Film Festival, Horizontes Latinos Award in San Sebastián, award for best feature film, actress and audience award at the Morelia International Film Festival, and award for best international film at the Gotham Awards in the United States.
On the Mexican card, he will compete with “The Suicide Squad” (“The Suicide Squad”), which also opens on Thursday.
“What we want to say to the public is to give us a vote of confidence. We know that we are going to go out with a blockbuster, with a superhero movie, (but) we believe that this movie is going to move and interest them, “said Valadez, who is already working on an upcoming fiction feature film,” Sujo ”Supported by the Sundance Institute.
“These are the real superheroes,” Rondero added about the search engines.
Publicado en el diario La Nación