michelonshain

El castillo de la antropofagia por Germán Tesse

2011-09-19T14:26:00.001-05:00

El segundo fin de semana del mes de septiembre quizás no incluyó en la cartelera local el estreno nacional de la controvertida cinta de Gerardo Naranjo “Miss Bala”, pero sí otro filme mexicano exhibido en Cannes.

Este correspondió a “Somos lo que Hay”, ópera prima del cineasta Jorge Michel Grau quien junto a la cinta del actor Diego Luna (“Abel”) y del ganador al premio de la Cámara de Oro durante el mismo certamen cinematográfico, Michael Rowe con “Año Bisiesto” dieron una digna competencia contra películas de todo el mundo en su edición 2010 como lo hiciera la mencionada cinta de Gerardo Naranjo en mayo de este año.

Y es que si “Año Bisiesto” es un homenaje al controversial y clásico de los años 70 “El Imperio de los Sentidos” (Nagisa Oshima, 1976), “Somos lo que Hay” bien podría decirse que es el equivalente a otro clásico de aquella década pero del cine mexicano: “El Castillo de la Pureza” (Arturo Ripstein, 1972), pero en este caso más bien sería “El Castillo de la Antropofagia” debido a que aquí la familia protagonista es presa del encierro al que está sometida por el patriarca de la misma pero además del canibalismo.

Precisamente, “Somos lo que Hay” inicia con un muy desconcertante prólogo en el que el mencionado patriarca de una familia del corazón del Distrito Federal sufre un ataque mortal mientras deambula en un desolado centro comercial en donde se queda prendado durante unos minutos frente a un aparador con maniquíes de figuras femeninas antes de caer al suelo luego de una serie de convulsiones.

Acto seguido, nos enteramos que sus dos hijos varones, Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro) y Julián (el desaparecido Alan Chávez) se ven forzados a salir a vender a un puesto ambulante su mercancía porque tanto ellos como la mamá (Carmen Beato) y la hija (Paulina Gaitán) asumen que el padre “se ha ido de putas como acostumbra” para que finalmente les informen del inesperado deceso.

De lo que justo en ese momento también se entera el espectador es que el patriarca no sólo era el único que salía al exterior a ganarse con la venta ambulante el sustento diario sino que, contrario a lo que se pudiera pensar, las prostitutas a las que iba a buscar no eran precisamente para satisfacer deseos sexuales sino más bien para que sirvieran como alimento para su familia de antropófagos que ultimaban a estas mujeres para comérselas luego de someterlas a un ritual y a falta ahora del patriarca uno de los miembros de la misma se tendrá que asumirse como el responsable de seguir esa “tradición”.

Con una crudeza que ha caracterizado al cine mexicano de la última década, pero aquí ampliamente justificada por la temática que toca, “Somos lo que Hay” no se remite a un caso en específico de la vida real como lo hizo “El Castillo de la Pureza”, pero estremece al espectador por no desligarse por completo de una realidad que ha superado la ficción en nuestro país, misma que incluye la corrupción policiaca en medio de la guerra contra la delincuencia representada por el personaje de Jorge Zárate combinada con un humor negro que incluye un guiño muy directo al personaje que hizo Daniel Giménez Cacho en la ópera prima de Guillermo del Toro “Cronos”, en 1992.

No se la pierda.

Cine mexicano en la pantalla grande por Omar Arriaga Garcés

2011-09-12T17:21:00.000-05:00

Con motivo de las Fiestas Patrias, acaban de estrenarse en las salas de la ciudad dos viejas conocidas del nuevo cine mexicano: El baile de San Juan, de Francisco Athié, y Somos lo que hay, de Jorge Mitchel, películas presentadas durante 2010 en los festivales de cine de Morelia y Guanajuato, respectivamente, que ostentan una visión opuesta más complementaria del país en el que vivimos.

Por un lado, El baile de San Juan, tercera producción de Francisco Athié (Lolo, 1992; Fibra óptica, 1996), ambientada en la época colonial, sumerge al espectador en los inicios de México al narrar la historia de Giovanni Marani, un joven actor de la Nueva España, hijo de padre italiano y madre indígena que, en busca de una carrera en los escenarios teatrales de la Corte, y desconociendo su origen, se verá inmerso en un dilema existencial por formar parte de aquello que antes le provocase aversión: el mestizaje.

Extraña suerte de tragedia griega en la que al protagonista se le cae la máscara para descubrir su propio rostro ante el espejo, pero con un final en el que se lo sublima en vez de destruírselo, El baile de San Juan es una puesta en escena, construida por más de ocho años y soportada rigurosamente desde lo histórico, acerca de los mecanismos más entrañables que determinaron el auge y la decadencia de la sociedad novohispana para dar paso al establecimiento del nuevo país.

En tanto que, por el otro, Somos lo que hay, ópera prima de Jorge Mitchel, ganadora como Mejor Largometraje del Festival Internacional de Cine de Guanajuato 2010, es una novela negra cuyos protagonistas son los miembros de una familia del Distrito Federal que, mediante sacrificios rituales, logran sobrevivir luego en el día a día de la capital. Metáfora siniestra del México en el que nos hallamos sumergidos actualmente, incestuosa antropofagia que ilustra la forma de vida a la que se ha llegado.

Y si al comienzo la película parece Principio y fin, el dramononón de Arturo Ripstein, espere, querido espectador, porque al final uno ya quiere un dramamine para el mareo… Así de sangrienta y barroca es esta farsa. Y nada de Hannibal Lecter ni de Silencio de los corderos o Dragón rojo: Mitchel nos recuerda que el organismo antropófago es una familia, médula de la sociedad, no un personaje perturbado de filme hollywoodense. Alusiones al canibalismo prehispánico y al tamalero asesino, resultan igualmente propicias.

Pese a la gran distancia temporal que existe entre una y otra, ambas cintas mantienen su vigencia al aludir a la actualidad de México; pero, mientras la primera lo hace remontándose al pasado colonial, colmando un vacío muchas veces relegado y respondiendo a la cuestión de qué ocurría aquí antes de la Independencia; la segunda está dolorosamente situada sobre las heridas del presente, como un desolador vaticinio del futuro que nos espera si la nave no endereza la trayectoria.

Altamente recomendables los dos filmes; mas, si lo que uno quiere es olvidar la violencia y dejar por un momento los temas de los noticieros, mejor ver El baile de San Juan; y si como afirma Rafael Lara, director de la comedia Labios rojos, protagonizada por Silvia Navarro y a estrenarse el próximo 7 de octubre de manera simultánea en México y Estados Unidos, el cine mexicano sólo tiene una semana (o incluso tres días) para hacerse conocer y disputarle un sitio a las omnipresentes películas de Hollywood, mejor ir cuanto antes a ver cualquiera de las dos películas, porque, seguramente, el jueves de la siguiente semana habrán abandonado la cartelera.

“We Are What We Are” and “Metalocalypse” Directors Join “The ABCs of Death”

2011-08-26T13:30:00.000-05:00

by Nigel M Smith (Updated 23 hours, 40 minutes ago)

Jason Eisener's "Hobo with a Shotgun." [Image courtesy of Magnet Releasing]
Drafthouse Films, Magnet Pictures and Timpson Films have come close to finalizing the list of 26 directors lined up to helm segments for their international co-production “The ABCs of Death.”

For the upcoming film, currently in co-production, each director was assigned a letter to represent a world (“animal attacks,” “beheadings,” “cannibals,” etc.) as an inspiration to tell a short story about death. A linking device will connect all 26 shorts.

Among the recent additions set to direct 26 individual episodes for the anthology horror film: Jon Schnepp (co-director of Adult Swin’s animated series “Metalocalypse”) and Jorge Michel Grau (“We Are What We Are”). They join an impressive roster that already included Jason Eisener (“Hobo with a Shotgun”), Ti West (“The Innkeepers”), Ben Wheatley (“Kill List”) and Srdjan Spasojevic (“A Serbian Film”).

The producers are holding a worldwide contest to find the 26th filmmaker to add to the crew. Go here to learn more about the contest, which ends October 1.

Below is the list of the 25 announced participating directors:

Kaare Andrews (“Altitude”), USA
Angela Bettis (“Roman”), USA
Ernesto Diaz Espinoza (“Mirageman;” “Mandrill”), Chile
Jason Eisener (“Hobo With A Shotgun”), Canada
Bruno Forzani & Héléne Cattet (“Amer”), Belgium
Adrian Garcia Bogliano (“Cold Sweat”), Mexico
Xavier Gens (“Frontiers;” “Hitman”), France
Jorge Michel Grau (“We Are What We Are”), Mexico
Noburo Iguchi, (“Robo Geisha”), Japan
Thomas Malling (“Norwegian Ninja”), Norway
Anders Morgenthaler (“Princess”), Denmark
Yoshihrio Nishimura (“Tokyo Gore Police”), Japan
Banjong Pisathanakun (“Shutter”),Thailand
Simon Rumley (“Red, White & Blue”), UK
Marcel Sarmiento (“Deadgirl”), USA
Jon Schnepp (“Metalocalypse;” “The Venture Bros.”), USA
Srdjan Spasojevic (“A Serbian Film”), Serbia
Timo Tjahjanto (“Macabre”), Indonesia
Andrew Traucki (“The Reef”), Australia
Nacho Vigalondo (“TimeCrimes”), Spain
Jake West “(Doghouse”), UK
Ti West (“House of the Devil”), USA
Ben Wheatley (“Down Terrace;” “Kill List”), UK
Adam Wingard (“A Horrible Way to Die”), USA
Yudai Yamaguchi (“Yakuza Weapon”), Japan

We Are What We Are – Reviewer: Craig Phillips Aug 1, 2011

2011-08-06T00:42:00.001-05:00

Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau's undeniably creepy if tonally uneven We Are What We Are (Somos los que hay) is on the one hand a melancholy dysfunctional family tale, and on the other hand, well... they'd like to eat it.

After their father perishes in a heap on a city sidewalk, the two sons, Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro) and Julian (Alan Chávez*), help their haggard mother (Carmen Beato) with the family finances as well as the family appetite, despite not being especially equipped for either role. The most important thing? Continuing the family "ritual" -- the unpleasant task the patriarch done for them for years. Meanwhile, two curious cops, after seeing the coroner find a finger in the man's stomach, decide to investigate further -- at their own risk.

We Are What We Are is not exactly the cannibal family Robinson here, it's melancholy but graphic, horror with elements of family melodrama. One twist is that the women, who certainly have their own issues, are hardier than the males -- more capable of "doing what is necessary" to keep the family going. There's also a bit of an incestuous connection with his sultry sister Sabina (Paulina Gaitán, star of Sin Nombre), who wants Julian to take charge, while the more timid older brother Alfredo is a closeted homosexual -- obvious to the family, despite his denial. The melancholic Barreiro's face seems always on the verge of tears or outburst.

As with Let the Right One In, which it at times reminded me of, the film has you empathizing with characters who are real, flesh and blood (in this case eaters of such) who just happen to be burdened with a horrific need. Rather than distance us from the cannibals, as many other horror films do, they feel like they could be us and it's all the more chilling because of it. We have met these monsters, and they could be among us. But while the family dynamic adds a layer of angst and realism, the film's social commentary (Mexican middle class consumerism vs. poverty) is a bit convoluted.

Clearly this is not a film for everyone. Slasher and torture porn fans may find it too slow of pace and too "real" to be appealing; arthouse patrons could be turned off by some of the more horrific scenes. But for the most part Grau keeps the most gruesome bits to our imagination -- except for the more violent final act -- and for those who are game, it's a unique, intelligent genre piece. It's also not an especially long film, certainly doesn't draw things out more than necessary.

It is well-shot (cinematography is by relative newcomer Santiago Sanchez), darkly lit with grungy tones the shades of flypaper and concrete, and it has oddly intriguing art direction -- their home includes a series of clocks on the wall, each showing different times and the morgue has an almost comical feel to it (as befitting the darkly funny dialogue -- Coroner: "It's shocking how many people eat each other inthis city.").

The cops who sniff the trail of the family are meant to be a bit of bumbling comic relief, though they aren't especially funny. But their investigation does give the plot needed suspense as it goes along, as it otherwise threatens to devour itself. As it shifts into gear near the end there are macabre shades of Se7en.

While the elements didn't all jibe together for me, I wouldn't hesitate to dub Grau a filmmaker to watch.

-

*Note: I have since discovered the sad note that actor Alan Chávez, who plays Julian, was killed by gunfire in Mexico City after this film was completed. It's tragic and also a little ironic, given how the film does not depict that metropolis in the most flattering, or safest, of lights.

We Are What We Are – DVD Review Posted by Jon Peters on Aug 1, 2011

2011-08-06T00:31:00.000-05:00

While it is too easy to call We Are What We Are a Mexican Hills Have Eyes, the parallels are too similar to ignore. Dark, unforgiving, and beautifully shot, director Jorge Michel Grau paints a morbidly social tale of a poor family in the slums of Mexico City, but there’s little depth behind this pretty picture. There’s some thrills and chills, and they almost work in Grau’s big, broad strokes, but there’s little reason for the events after the credits roll, with a far too familiar twist at the end.
We Are What We Are is a cannibal family movie, minus the kookiness of that premise. Once this family loses their dad, they plan on carrying out the Ritual, but all goes to Hell and back, when an autopsy of their father, reveals a woman’s severed finger. The cops, sniffing potential money in the rights to this story, investigate. Within this set-up, the heart of the film is the deteriorating family connections between the mother and her sons. While Wes Craven kindly explored this notion back in the late 1970s with his cannibal family in The Hills Have Eyes, Grau manages to push the bonds of this family, their roles, and their expectations of some Ritual they keep blabbing about to the far extremes of their capacity. It’s like watching a chicken with its head cut off. Sooner or later, it’ll collapse.
Much like the family here. Yet there’s plenty of set-up with any real answers. Why are they cannibals? Because they are poor? If the mom recognizes their monster status as cannibals, why continue? Any correlation to the nature of capitalism’s fallout, is too loose to render the film depth. While the film is certainly moody, somewhat gory, and Grau is a gifted film-maker, much of We Are What We Are leaves the audience to confused without any payoff or sometimes, explanation to care beyond the prostitute gore.
The DVD:
Audio/Video: MPI Home Video offers up a really slick looking DVD. The details are high, and while it’s not the most colorful movie, the picture is vivid in its depiction of the reds and browns in the movie. The audio is equally as good too, no hisses, clean, and good subtitles.

DVD Review: We Are What We Are by Branden Chowen - July 31, 2011

2011-08-04T15:35:00.001-05:00

Cannibal films seem to play second fiddle nowadays in the horror genre. This subgenre thrived with exploitation films of the ‘70s and ‘80s, with the “cannibal boom” era being 1977 to 1981. Today, we see vampires, werewolves, and remakes taking over the genre, which is why it is so refreshing to see first-time director Jorge Michel Grau’s Spanish cannibal film, We Are What We Are. Unlike the cannibal films that have come before it, though, We Are trades exploitation for a thought-provoking, and intense family drama.

We Are opens with an unexplained death of an older man. We come to find out that, before dying, this man was a patriarch, with two sons, a daughter, and a wife. The grieving family must now figure out how to survive without their father and husband to provide for them. Most importantly, the family must prepare for their ritual, which requires not only the taking of, but also the consuming of another human life.

Writer and director Jorge Michel Grau manages excellence in quite a few areas. The one that stands out the most has to be his decision to use long shots, even in the most brutal scenes. These lengthy shots add a sense of realism, and help the claustrophobic atmosphere of the dank, dark family home invade the viewer’s mind. This is one of the few films where showing less gore works. The film was shot with a small budget, and Grau replaces expensive special effects with masterful camera techniques, and it works better than 90% of the horror films I’ve seen in the past few years. Don’t get me wrong: We Are has a lot of blood; what makes the blood memorable, though, is how realistically it is produced.

The word “realistic” is one that bleeds into virtually every aspect of this film, and it is what makes We Are so disturbing. The perfect casting of Carmen Beato as Patricia – the mother – is the heart that keeps the creepiness of the family beating. She is, at times, cold and powerful, but also meek and sympathetic; no matter what, though, she is always ruthless. Beato’s veteran acting ability leads the much younger cast, who all rise up to Beato’s level. Paulina Gaitan (Sabina), Francisco Barreiro (Alfredo), and Alan Chávez (Julian) are all excellent young talents that have a bright future in film. Barreiro steals the show mostly because his character goes through the biggest arc in the story, and his changes – from dealing with becoming the new patriarch, his qualms with his mother, and his own sexual identity – are worth watching the film alone. Paulina Gaitan is beautiful and seductive, even to her own brother, which makes her character engaging. Alan Chávez’s Julian character is ferocious, and his actions call his past into question. Julian is definitely the most outwardly violent character in the film, but little is done to explain why this is. That small criticism aside, all the main characters in We Are are three-dimensional, and force the viewer to take notice. That’s a sentence not often seen when discussing a cannibal film.

Jorge Michel Grau makes the choice to leave a lot of gray area in We Are. There are few straight answers, and this may turn off some viewers. Why this ritual must take place, or the specifics of it are never really explained. The same can be said for the father figure that sparks this newfound rift in the family: how did he die? How did he handle this family’s business before his passing? These are just some of the many questions left unanswered. In some films, this vagueness would be a negative, but in We Are, it merely adds to the depth, grunginess, and realism of the film.

We Are is not for impatient viewers. The pacing is unquestionably slow. Fortunately the film’s climax is worth the wait, and even though the final act will be too muddy for some, We Are What We Are still stands out as one of the most interesting horror films, and best cannibal films, I’ve seen in years. This will surely develop a cult following in years to come, but there’s no reason to wait until then to check it out. We Are What We Are is absolutely recommended.

This We Are What We Are DVD from IFC Films looks great. There is rarely anything lost when the film goes into dark scenes, and the daytime scenes are bright as can be. The original 2.35:1 aspect ratio is left in tact, giving this DVD an anamorphic widescreen presentation. The Dolby Digital 5.1 Spanish sound option is equally adequate, and there is never any sound effects or dialogue lost to background music. There are also English and Spanish subtitle options. Again, the movie is spoken in Spanish with English (or Spanish) subtitles.

The special features on this DVD leave a lot to be desired. There is the We Are What We Are trailer (1:41) that sets the stage for the film well. Then there is a longer “making of” feature (28:32) that is a mixed bag in terms of quality. There are no interviews with the actors or the director, and the majority of the feature has loud background music taking over any potential dialogue. This is interesting in that it shows how some of the long shots and special effects were handled, but there is also a pointless 10-minute scene of the cast running around the studio area thrown in as well. The lack of any type of director’s commentary is a big disappointment.

IFC Films delivers on the audio/video side of the disc, but the 28-minute “making of” is too filled with fluff to be as good as it could’ve been. Fortunately the main feature is well worth the price of admission. Grau manages to make a cannibalistic family sympathetic, which is nothing short of brilliant. Anyone looking for a new take on the cannibal film – and those who are willing to sit through some slow pacing to reach the payoff – will want to give We Are What We Are a purchase.

IFC Films presents We Are What We Are. Written and Directed by: Jorge Michel Grau. Starring: Carmen Beato, Paulina Gaitan, Francisco Barreiro, and Alan Chávez. Running time: 89 minutes. Rating: Not Rated. Released on DVD: July 26, 2011. Available at Amazon.com.

‘We Are What We Are’ Reviewed by Rick Klaw

2011-07-11T13:29:00.001-05:00

Directed/Written by: Jorge Michel Grau
Starring: Francisco Barreiro, Alan Chávez, Paulina Gaitán, Carmen Beato, Jorge Zárate and Esteban Soberánes

In a debut feature reminiscent of the 1977 Wes Craven classic “The Hills Have Eyes,” writer-director Jorge Michel Grau offers a unique portrait of an unusual Mexican family with the disturbing and compelling “We Are What We Are.”

Following the sudden death of their patriarch/caretaker, the temperamental Patricia (Carmen Beato) and her three teenage children must fend for themselves. Father prepared the rituals and acquired the meat for this family of cannibals. Aided by his impetuous younger brother Julián (Alan Chávez) and his pragmatic sister Sabina (Paulina Gaitán), the eldest son, Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro), is now charged with this momentous task, a responsibility he seems ill suited for. Chaos and emotional turmoil follow as the family hunts for the flesh they need to survive.

Grau, winner of several awards for shorter works, populates this claustrophobic, dark reality with unsavory and unsympathetic characters. A bumbling cop (Jorge Zárate), creepy undertaker (Daniel Giménez Cacho) and an effeminate young man (Esteban Soberánes) initially appear as possible comic relief in the oppressively nihilistic film, but all quickly spiral into the inner voids of selfishness and cruelty. Even the likable Sabina descends to the depths of the familial hell. After all, it is difficult to maintain sympathy for someone after watching him or her gleefully nibble on the bloody thigh of a bound victim.

Astonishingly, despite the unpleasant premise, Grau manages to keep the bloodletting below pre-spectacle levels, rather relying primarily on shadows and innuendo with just the proper amount of shock-inducing gore, more in line with a Hitchcockian thriller than the film’s more immediate antecedents such as the “Saw” films, “The Descent” and “Hostel.” The oft-times surprising story, replete with none-too-subtle parallels to contemporary urban Mexican life, disappointedly culminates into a predictable conclusion.

Empowered by some excellent acting especially from Gaitán (“Sin Nombre”) and Barreiro (“Perpetuum Mobile”), the mesmerizing “We Are What We Are” features the arrival of a promising new talent, destined to be a prominent figure within the next generation of horror moviemakers.

Egy kicsi abból, amik vagyunk - Interjú a Vagyunk, akik vagyunk alkotóival hangyaPASS#01: az ötödik film 2011. június 21-én a mozikban by Árva Márton

2011-07-05T20:52:00.001-05:00

A hangyaPASS#01 ötödik filmje, a Vagyunk, akik vagyunk kapcsán Jorge Michel Grau rendező, Nicolás Celis producer és Francisco Barreiro színész részvételével online beszélgettünk a mexikói új filmről, emberi drámákról és horrorba oltott társadalomrajzról. A folytatásban olvasható az interjú szövege! Aki videó verzióban is kíváncsi az alkotókra, az pedig kattintson IDE!

PRAE.HU: Az utóbbi öt-hat évben látványosan megnövekedett az elsőfilmek száma Mexikóban. Új és nagyon merész generáció lepte el a mexikói film színterét, és nemzetközi sikereket ért el. Szerintetek minek köszönhető ez?

Jorge Michel Grau: Úgy gondolom, több faktor együttesen érvényesül a 2005 utáni elsőfilmek esetében. Az egyik legfontosabb Mexikó politikai fordulata. 2000-ben kormányváltás történt nálunk, és azelőtt 70 évig ugyanaz a párt volt hatalmon. A 2000-ben kormányra került párt egyik legfontosabb ígérete volt, hogy szólásszabadságot teremt. Így sok, addig elhallgattatott hang és addig cenzúrázott téma előtt nyitották meg a kapukat, hogy a hatalmat megkapják és megtarthassák. Az emberek már nem féltek filmezni, dokumentumfilmeket vagy leleplező kisfilmeket készíteni. Mégis rossz szájíz maradt ez után a kormányváltás után, mert jött egy új kormány, ami illúziókba kergetett, és öt évvel később az ország a fordulat előttinél is rosszabb állapotban volt. Szerintem ez az egyik oka annak, hogy az új generáció másfajta diskurzust folytat, új megközelítésmódja van. Ennek az eredményét látjuk most: rengeteg film, sok közülük elsőfilm, amik az ország jelenéről és valóságáról szólnak. A másik fontos ok, hogy Mexikóban egy olyan produkciós rendszert állítottak fel, ami adókedvezményhez juttatja a filmkészítést. Ez lehetővé teszi, hogy sokan részt vegyenek a filmiparban, és mivel a második vagy harmadik filmjüket készítők hozzájutnak ehhez a kedvezményhez, az elsőfilmesek hozzáférnek az állami kerethez.

Nicolás Celis: Teljesen igaz, amit Jorge mondott. Ettől a filmgyártás minden területe fellendült, vagyis minden műfaj hozzájuthatott az anyagi forrásokhoz, pályakezdő és már tapasztaltabb rendezők is. A kezdő filmesek így belevághatnak a filmezésbe jó ötletekkel, és nem az anyagi haszon az elsődleges céljuk, hanem az, hogy elmesélhessék a történetüket anélkül, hogy túl sok mindent kéne kockára tenniük. Úgy gondolom, hogy ez nekünk és más filmeseknek is sokat segített, hogy megtegyék az első lépést a filmkészítés felé.

J.M.G.: Szerintem az internet elterjedésének is köszönhető, hogy globálisak lehetünk, és hozzáférhetünk más országok filmjeihez. Ez sokkal szélesebb skálát tár elénk. Láthatunk olyan dolgokat, amikhez eddig nem tudtunk hozzájutni. Mexikó, harmadik világbeli ország révén, sok tekintetben elmaradott, de az internet lehetőséget ad, hogy olyan műveket, képzőművészetet, zenét érjünk el, amikkel pótoljuk a lemaradást.

Francisco Barreiro: Szerintem fontos az is, hogy megváltozott a filmkészítés módja. Éppen azzal, hogy bejöttek az új technológiák, a filmkészítés egyre inkább elérhető cél lett. A kép egyre jobb felbontású, és ez új produkciós módokat tesz lehetővé, ahol a filmkészítés olcsóbb lehet, ezért ambiciózus projekteket meg lehet valósítani egyszerűbben, letisztultabban. Ez is hozzájárult, hogy sok kezdő filmes elszántabban próbálta véghezvinni a terveit. A filmkészítés folyamatosan alakul, és a technológiák egyre közelebb kerülnek a művészek alapvető igényeihez, akik így ki tudják fejezni magukat.

N.C.: Még annyit tennék hozzá ahhoz, amit Jorge és Paco elmondtak, hogy Latin-Amerikában az ilyen típusú, nemzetközi hírű filmek, melyek ezeken a piacokon működnek, koprodukciókban készülnek. Nemzetközi filmalapokhoz jutottak el, különféle pályázatokon vettek részt. Tehát mexikói projektekről beszélünk, bár ezek részben európai pénzből készültek. Sok mexikói film anyagilag elbukna, ha nem érné el külföldön az ideális közönségét, és így nem tudná behozni a költségeit.

PRAE.HU: Ebben a helyzetben hogyan lehet megtartani a saját karaktert, a mexikóiságot úgy, hogy a világ más részein is emészthető mozit készíts?

N.C.: Mexikó nagyon nagy és sokszínű ország. Nagyon gazdag, nagyon szegény, rengeteg árnyalata van, ezért sokfajta mozi készül itt, és ennek így is kell lennie. Az egyik az erőszakot, a másik a szépséget tárgyalja, a dokumentumfilmek a közösségekről, a politikusokról beszélnek. Sok témát kell feldolgozni, történetek várnak elmesélésre. De egyre kevesebb tér van arra, hogy megmutassuk őket, és nem csak Mexikóban. Úgy normál forgalmazásban, mint a fesztiválokon egyre nehezebb a független produkciók helyzete, és egyre nagyobb erőfeszítéseket kell tenni, hogy megmutassuk a mexikói mozi összes árnyalatát. Akár koprodukciókkal érjük el, hogy szélesebb körben mutassák be a filmeket, nemzetközi forgalmazással, akár digitális terjesztéssel, interneten, fontos, hogy ez a fajta filmezés továbbra is létezhessen, és hogy az alkotók, írók tovább írhassanak anélkül, hogy attól kelljen félniük, hogy lesz-e, aki kíváncsi ezekre a történetekre.

PRAE.HU: Mi Iñárritu generációjának szerepe az ezredforduló körüli gyors változásokban?

J.M.G.: Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro és Iñárritu generációja éppen 2000-ben hagyja el az országot, a Korcs szerelmek után, ami a húsbavágó valóságot nagyon látványos narrációval dolgozza fel. Ők ezután már nem Mexikóban filmeznek, de fontos szerepük van abban, hogy a fiatalokat arra ösztönözzék, tanuljanak filmiskolákban. A film, amivel Guillermo del Toro elindította ezt a generációt, 1993-ban készült, a Cronos¸a Korcs szerelmeknél sokkal régebbi film. A Korcs szerelmek hozta el az áttörést, a nemzetközi sajtófigyelmet, és szerintem a legfontosabb az, hogy az emberek közeledni kezdtek a filmoktatáshoz, és hinni kezdtek a filmben. Ezen kívül pedig ránk irányította több médium figyelmét, a sajtóét és a fesztiválokét is, amik ezután figyelték, mit csinálunk.

PRAE.HU: Ha már említetted a Cronost, rátérhetünk a Vagyunk, akik vagyunkra, amiben van egy Cronos-hommage jelenet, amivel a fekete humor belép az amúgy deprimáltabb hangulatú filmbe. Miért ez a tiszteletadás?

J.M.G.: Ebből az említett generációból Guillermo del Toro az a rendező, aki miatt szerettem volna filmet készíteni. Amikor a moziban láttam a Cronost, belebolondultam. Mert a műfaj azelőtt Mexikóban elég szegény volt, a néhány horrorra specializálódott rendezőnk, mint Taboada és López Moctezuma már ekkora befejezte pályáját, és az ő filmjeik középszerűek voltak. Guillermo del Toro a Cronosszal forradalmasította a műfajt az országban, és engem is rabul ejtett. Én 2000-ben kezdtem a filmiskolában, és kamaszkorom óta imádtam ezt a filmet. Így amikor lehetőségem volt megírni a forgatókönyvet, nem volt kétséges számomra, hogy tisztelegni fogok a film előtt, ami elvezetett a műfajhoz, és ahhoz, hogy ezen a műfajon belül fogalmazzam meg a mondanivalómat.

PRAE.HU: A Cronos is a szörny emberi oldalát mutatja, ahogy azt a Vagyunk, akik vagyunk családja esetében is láthatjuk. Francisco, a te karaktered is szörnyeteg, mégis van egy érzelmes, bizonytalan oldala is. Milyen kihívások elé állított a szerep?

F.B.: Éppen erről van szó, a legfontosabb kihívás, amit Jorge már a legelején tisztázott velünk, az volt, hogy megpróbáljuk ezeket a személyiségeket egy valószerűségbe ágyazni, egy olyan valóságba, ami létezhet Mexikóvárosban. Hogy tényleg az legyen az érzésünk, amikor látjuk őket a vásznon, hogy akár köztünk is járhatnak. Mexikóban volt ilyenre példa, létezhet kannibalizmus egy nagyvárosban. Úgy gondolom, ez volt az elsődleges kihívás. Emberi lényekről beszéltünk, akik valamilyen kisebb törzshöz tartoznak, amikből nagyon sok van Mexikóban, és mindegyik más-más szokásokat gyakorol. Ez az egyik közülük, amelynek saját szokásai vannak, de ez csak egy a sok csoportosulás közül, akik Mexikóvárosban élnek. Nagyon fontos volt megformálni az emberi lényt, és ezután megmutatni a szörnyeteget, a kannibált, vagy bármi legyen is.

PRAE.HU: Jorge, a forgatókönyv megtörtént esetet dolgoz fel, vagy tisztán társadalmi parabola?

J.M.G.: Ez egy társadalmi parabola, egy allegória, az én értelmezésem arról, ami ma Mexikóban történik. Az az érzésed, hogy mindenki a maga bőrét menti. Hogy az embernek a saját érdekeit kell néznie, mivel nincsen egy szabályozó hatalom, és mert az utca hihetetlenül veszélyes. Vannak olyan államok, ahol az emberek nem mennek ki az utcára este hat után. Mert az utca már nem hozzánk tartozik, hanem a drogkereskedőkhöz. Ettől széthullik a társadalom, és én ezt az értékvesztést próbáltam meg megfogalmazni a filmben. Azt, hogy az emberek ma már nem ismerik egymást, hogy lehet, hogy a veled szemben élő szomszédod egy kannibál, és te nem is tudsz róla, észre sem veszed. Másrészt, hogy megalapozott legyen ez a valószerűség a filmben, amiről Paco beszélt, végeztem kutatásokat a városi kannibalizmusról, a rituális kannibalizmust vizsgáltam. Felkutattam azokat a gyilkosokat, akik végül megették az áldozatukat, és ebből merítettem, amikor kialakítottam a karakterek személyiségét. De a film alapvetően társadalmi parabola.

PRAE.HU: Tehát egyrészt a társadalmi mondanivaló, másrészt a műfajokkal való játék motivált, mert egy horrorról van szó, aminek drámai oldala is van.

J.M.G.: Igen, ez volt a nagy kockázat a filmben. A film a CCC (a mexikói filmiskola) elsőfilmes projektjéhez tartozik. Amikor a forgatókönyv más tervekkel versenyzett, az egyik vonzereje éppen ezeknek a műfajoknak a kockázatos keverése volt: Mi történne, ha egy olyan történetet mesélnék, ami az emberek szemében drámai, vagy melodrámai, mégis a horror műfaján belül tenném ezt? Felkeltette a figyelmüket, és ennek szerintem döntő szerepe volt abban, hogy a film megnyerte a versenyt, és lehetőséget kaptunk, hogy megcsináljuk. Lettek nagyon szerencsés dolgok a filmben, az egyik ez a hibrid, amit a színészek rendkívüli munkájával értünk el. Ez sokat segített, hogy a melodráma is megmaradjon, és a horror szerkezet is működjön.

PRAE.HU: Egy újabb párhuzam a Cronos és a Vagyunk, akik vagyunk között, hogy a Cronost is jobban fogadták külföldön.

N.C.: Úgy gondolom, hogy nehéz tükörbe nézni. Nálunk Mexikóban az erőszak nagyon aktuális téma és szerintem külföldön ez a film nagy meglepetéseket okozott. Egy olyan valóságot mutat, amibe beléphet az ember, átérezheti, és fokozatosan sikerülhet megérteni az üzenetet, amit szántunk neki, tehát, hogy beleilleszti a filmbéli családot a mai mexikói társadalomba. Úgy gondolom, a külföldieknek ez érdekes, mert a korrupcióról, a család védelméről szól, és beszél a Mexikóban lévő minivárosokról. Ezek rengeteg házból állnak, a szomszédok félnek egymástól, az autókat rácsok alatt tartják. Sokan úgy gondolhatják, hogy ez a valóság nem igaz, nem történhet meg. De sok eset példázza a kannibalizmust Mexikóban, és nagyon szokatlan szembenézni valamivel, ami ennyire durva, mégis igaz. Talán a te szomszédod nem kannibál, de emberrabló, és a mellette lévő házból tart fogva valakit. Szóval úgy gondolom, hogy a nemzetközi publikum számára a film egy más megközelítésből mutat meg egy olyan Mexikót, amit nem látott előtte.

PRAE.HU: Jorge, hogyan segítenél a film végkifejletének értelmezésében? Mit jelent Sabina (Paulina Gaitán) démoni nézése?

J.M.G.: Két dolgot szerettem volna elérni. A film célja az, hogy azonosulj a szörnnyel, mert amikor a túlélés szükségéről van szó, mindannyian szörnyetegek leszünk, mindünkkel megtörténik, hogy át kell taposnunk valakin, nehogy ő taposson ránk. Tehát a szereplők ellenségévé válsz, ugyanakkor kialakul valamilyen kötődésed is hozzájuk. Ezért tetszett az az érzés, hogy a néző örülhet annak, hogy Sabina túlélte, de ugyanezért érezze is magát veszélyben. Hogy cinkosa legyél a bestiának. Másrészt pedig a pesszimizmusom miatt mindig azt gondoltam, hogy a bestia és a gonosz sosem halnak meg. Tehát az is a szándékom volt, hogy azt mondjam a közönségnek: “Nem menekültél meg!”

PRAE.HU: A mai mexikói filmek nagy részében megjelenik az a motívum, hogy a hősnek el kell foglalnia azt az űrt, ami az idősek eltűnte után marad. Van ebben valami önreflexív?

J.M.G.: Mexikóban a családok két ok miatt is családfő nélkül maradnak. Az egyik a kivándorlás. Az Egyesült Államokba emigráló mexikóiak túlnyomó többsége férfi. Az ő családjuk így apakép nélkül marad. Ezért a családnak újra kell szerveződnie, újra kell osztani a családban betöltött szerepeket a túléléshez. És ma a másik fontos faktor, ami miatt a családok apa nélkül maradnak a drog. 40 000 halottról beszélünk, aminek legalább 80%-a férfi. Tehát apa nélküli családot nagyon gyakran látni az utcán. Ez is a kérdése a filmnek: Mi történik a családdal, ha elveszíti a vezetőjét? És itt nem csupán a család fejéről van szó, hanem a szellemi vezérről, aki a rítust elvégzi, és aki kötelezi a családot is annak gyakorlására, és ellátja őket élelemmel, biztonságot ad, stb. Mi történik a családdal? Igen, ez egy közös nevező a mexikói családok között.

PRAE.HU: Ez a helyzet rímelhet az éles törés után pályakezdő filmesek helyzetére is, nem?

J.M.G.: De, valóban, ez egy érdekes értelmezés, hogy mi is vezetők nélkül maradtunk.

PRAE.HU: Köszönöm, hogy elfogadtátok a részvételt, és sok sikert kívánok!

J.M.G.: Nagyon köszönjük, és köszönjük, hogy eljuttatják a munkánkat a magyar nézőkhöz, hogy megismerjenek egy kicsit abból, amik vagyunk.

A Vagyunk, akik vagyunk (Somos lo que hay) junius 21-én látható az ország mozijaiban a hangyaPASS#01 örödik filmjeként.

Bővebb információk a magyarhangya weboldalán és facebook oldalán olvashatóak - a hangyaPASS-ról, a filmekről, a vetítésekről...

Vagyunk, akik vagyunk (Somos lo que hay)
Színes, feliratos, mexikói horror, 90 perc, 2010.

Rendező: Jorge Michel Grau
Forgatókönyvíró: Jorge Michel Grau
Zeneszerző: Enrico Chapela
Operatőr: Santiago Sanchez
Vágó: Rodrigo Ríos

Szereplők: Francisco Barreiro (Alfredo), Paulina Gaitan (Sabina), Alan Chávez (Julian), Adrián Aguirre (Adriana), Miriam Balderas (Sheila), Carmen Beato (Patricia)

Bemutató: 2011. június 21. (a film csak ezen az egyetlen napon nyakoncsípető!)

Forgalmazza: Cinefil Co és a magyarhangya

Egy kicsi abból, amik vagyunk (videó verzió)

2011-07-05T20:50:00.000-05:00

A hangyaPASS#01 ötödik filmje, a Vagyunk, akik vagyunk (Somos lo que hay) kapcsán Jorge Michel Grau rendezőt, Nicolás Celis producert és Francisco Barreiro színészt kerítette webkamera elé a magyarhangya segítségével Árva Márton. A mexikói új filmről, emberi drámákról és horrorba oltott társadalomrajzról beszélgettek. A folytatásban látató az interjú videó-verziója! Az írott változatért kattintsatok IDE!

Pursuing Imperfection in Malick’s Eden

2011-05-22T21:00:00.002-05:00

TERRENCE MALICK, the reclusive filmmaker who dislikes having his photograph taken and has not given an interview since the 1970s, could hardly be more out of place than amid the swarming media circus that is the Cannes Film Festival. But thanks to his scarcity of output, his sphinxlike reticence and the near-religious fervor of his fans, the elusive Mr. Malick also provides exactly what Cannes thrives on: mystique and anticipation.

His new film, “The Tree of Life” — which had been expected to show at last year’s festival and is only his fifth feature in 38 years — was finally unveiled on Monday to an eager press corps, before its United States release on May 27. “The Tree of Life” has big stars, celestial spectacles and a few digital dinosaurs, but it is no one’s idea of a summer blockbuster. Even more elliptical than Mr. Malick’s previous two films, “The Thin Red Line” (1998) and “The New World” (2005), the film tells the story of a 1950s Texas family (the parents are played by Brad Pitt and the relative newcomer Jessica Chastain) whose oldest son grows up to be a morose Sean Penn. But it also tackles, metaphysically speaking, the whole kit and caboodle: the origins of life and the history of the universe.

The intrigue surrounding “The Tree of Life” has much to do with the stories and rumors of its long gestation. Before he vanished off the filmmaking map in the late ’70s, after two well-received films, “Badlands” (1973) and “Days of Heaven” (1978), Mr. Malick, who turns 68 this year, had been developing a movie called “Q,” for which he reportedly dispatched cinematographers to far-flung corners of the world to capture an array of natural phenomena. (Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer of “The Tree of Life,” confirmed that some images in the new film date from earlier periods of exploration.)

Mr. Malick’s films have returned to the mythic premise of a lost Eden, but while they have linked the metaphorical Fall with historical eras — the advent of the industrial age (“Days of Heaven”), the establishment of the American colonies (“The New World”) — “The Tree of Life” treats the loss of innocence as part of the eternal human condition. It’s safe to assume that this passion project is also, for its fiercely private auteur, a deeply personal film. Some aspects of the movie correspond with the morsels of biography that have surfaced over the years: the Texas childhood, a strict father, the death of a brother.

“I was shocked by how personal the story was when I first read it,” said the production designer Jack Fisk, who has worked on all of Mr. Malick’s films and has known him since they were students at the American Film Institute. “But when I watched the film I just think how universal it is.” A recurring refrain among Mr. Malick’s collaborators was the degree to which his scripts are mere starting points, extensively revised, even discarded, once shooting begins. Bill Pohlad, a producer of “The Tree of Life,” compared the film’s screenplay to poetry; Mr. Lubezki likened it to a Russian novel.

Since “The Tree of Life” is less bound to dialogue and plot than Mr. Malick’s previous films, Mr. Lubezki, who also shot “The New World,” said he was able to more fully embrace Mr. Malick’s preferred approach, avoiding traditional camera setups and instead emphasizing handheld mobility, natural light and the search for the unrepeatable moment. Because the interior spaces are not lighted, Mr. Fisk typically adds windows to houses or cuts holes into ceilings on Mr. Malick’s sets; on “The Tree of Life” Mr. Lubezki consulted paintings by Vermeer, in which shadowy rooms are illuminated by a window’s soft light. Three houses were used for the principal location; the production moved from one to another depending on the direction of the sun. “Terry’s not really a stickler for continuity,” Mr. Fisk said.

Despite his reputation as a perfectionist, Mr. Malick by all accounts strove for a documentary-style spontaneity on “The Tree of Life.” “It’s more found than planned,” Mr. Lubezki said. “Terry would say, don’t worry about getting a piece of dialogue or an interaction of the actors, but try to get the feeling of the first time being in a room with them.”

The mood on the set matched the subject of the film: a heightened alertness to the world. “When you’re shooting with Terry, everybody’s very aware of their surroundings,” Mr. Lubezki said. With their birdsong soundtracks and their signature images of nature and the elements — light through treetops, windblown grass, flowing water — Mr. Malick’s movies are both more concrete and more abstract than most. They pay close attention to the sensual materiality of flora and fauna, places and things (“Tree of Life” locations include the California redwood forest and the Utah salt flats), but they also seek “to put emotions on film,” Mr. Lubezki said, “which is something there’s no manual for.”

It can be hard for actors to find their place within the willful, perpetual flux of a Malick production — some members of the large ensemble of "The Thin Red Line" were unexpectedly sidelined, or even eliminated.

“Actually, he’s an imperfectionist,” Mr. Pitt said of Mr. Malick, speaking in an interview at the Carlton Hotel here. “He finds perfection in imperfection, and he’s always trying to create the imperfection.” He added that working with Mr. Malick was “liberating but exhausting,” a rare opportunity to fulfill what he called “this actor’s quest of always trying to be in the moment, which is a bit precious but very true.”

Mr. Malick often calls for his actors not to create a character so much as embody a concept or a feeling. Ms. Chastain said that her audition consisted mainly of “acting out behaviors, like putting a baby to sleep or looking at someone with love and respect.”

It also falls upon the cast to deliver Mr. Malick’s distinctive voice-overs. In “The Tree of Life,” as in “The Thin Red Line” and “The New World,” the hushed, dazed narration — handed off from one actor to another — has the tone of a prayer. From the start Mr. Malick has tried to find uses for voice-over that go against and beyond the traditional explanatory purpose. “When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés,” he said in a 1975 interview with Sight & Sound, referring to Sissy Spacek’s narration in “Badlands.” “That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them.”
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Photofest
Brooke Adams in "Days of Heaven."

The Times at Cannes
Manohla Dargis, a chief film critic of The New York Times, and Melena Ryzik and Dennis Lim are reporting from the Cannes Film Festival.
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ArtsBeat Blog: Another Malick Film So Soon? (May 16, 2011)
Ms. Chastain recalled that when she told Mr. Malick she wouldn’t have time to memorize the long monologues that he would present to her minutes before shooting, his response was that she should “just say whatever you remember because that’ll be enough.” But Mr. Malick’s insistence on freedom does not preclude obsessive fine-tuning: after the shoot, he called her in — by her count, more than 30 times — to record new lines and re-record old ones.

As Mr. Malick’s films grow increasingly allusive and amorphous, he seems more than ever to find them in the editing. “Our focus was to make it more of an experience and not about plot,” said Mark Yoshikawa, one of the five editors who worked on “The Tree of Life.” “The flow of the film was an ever-changing animal.” Without a linear story to guide them, the editors had to integrate live-action scenes that shift between two time periods (and more than one reality) with nature shots and special-effects sequences. Mr. Malick, an avid birdwatcher, had previously used computer-generated effects only once, to add a now-extinct parakeet to the Virginia wilds of “The New World.” “The Tree of Life,” which depicts the Big Bang, the beginning of precellular life and the Mesozoic age of dinosaurs, called for extensive effects work.

Dan Glass, the senior visual effects supervisor, said that the guiding principle was realism: “There’s not a shot that doesn’t have something natural or organic in it.” Even though entire movie worlds are now routinely digitized from scratch, Mr. Glass and his team worked with existing satellite and space-probe imagery and used optical tricks, like manipulating film speeds and camera lenses.

For the astrophysical sequences, Mr. Malick turned to the filmmaker and special effects veteran Douglas Trumbull, best known for his work on “2001: A Space Odyssey.” They set up a lab in Austin, Tex., where Mr. Malick lives, and essentially conducted chemistry experiments: photographing paints and liquids (like fluorescein dyes and half-and-half) in tanks of water at high speeds, which produced images that could be digitally composited to resemble astronomical phenomena like interstellar clouds. “With computer graphics everything is based on some algorithm and there’s often a predictability to it,” Mr. Trumbull said. “Terry and I wanted randomness and irregularity that seemed truly natural.”

“The Tree of Life” deepens and complicates Mr. Malick’s view of nature. Detractors make him out to be a moony New Ager, but his films are not just awestruck paeans to nature, nor are they simple assertions of man’s place in nature. “The Tree of Life” distinguishes the way of nature (equated with the father) from the way of grace (the mother). Ms. Chastain interpreted her character as a personification of “the spiritual world,” a contrast to the natural world, “which is all about survival of the fittest,” she said, and which, in the movie takes the form of Darwinian natural selection and American bootstrap capitalism.

Mr. Malick’s work has long been discussed in philosophical terms — his background as a Heidegger scholar is often invoked — but increasingly his films bespeak an unfashionably overt interest in spirituality. Biblical references run through the films, and “The Tree of Life” opens with a quotation from the Book of Job. But Ms. Chastain, who prepared for her role by studying paintings of the Madonna and practicing meditation, said she does not see it as a film about Christianity. “I consider him more of a spiritual person than a religious person,” Mr. Fisk said.

Mr. Pitt described Mr. Malick as someone with “a strong belief in God but also in science.” Watching “The Tree of Life” again at its Cannes premiere, he found himself leaning toward an agnostic interpretation. While we “try to comfort ourselves and pillow ourselves with religion,” he said, “maybe the real peace and beauty is to be found in the unknown.”

Mr. Malick has already shot — and is starting to edit — his sixth feature. Set in the present day, the still-untitled film stars Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams, and has been described as a romance. As always, everyone is tight-lipped, but Mr. Lubezki and Mr. Fisk, who both worked on it, said it is his boldest film yet. “It makes ‘Tree’ almost seem old-fashioned,” Mr. Fisk said.

Growing more radical with age, Mr. Malick seems intent on evolving the language of narrative cinema, on finding a form free and flexible enough to encompass the big, unanswerable questions of human existence. “Every film now is almost a frustration, because Terry doesn’t know if he’s said enough,” Mr. Fisk said. “But I also think he’s finally making movies exactly the way he wants to.”

We have decided not to die - Daniel Askill

2011-05-10T14:07:00.000-05:00

mr. Gnome "Spain" Live

2011-05-08T23:52:00.000-05:00

Colder - Losing Myself

2011-05-01T19:28:00.000-05:00

Entrevista Jorge Michel Grau por Brandon Harris

2011-04-18T11:18:00.001-05:00

In We Are What We Are, first time Mexican helmer Jorge Michel Grau creates a deeply unsettling portrait of contemporary Mexican urban life which steady grows into many things all at once: a sincere family drama, an earnest exploration of the moral implications of cannibalism and a ribald satire of the seemingly intractable political and economic corruption that is haunting present day Mexico. All moody nighttime vistas and grim, claustrophobic interiors, Grau’s film manages both social commentary and grisly, bone-chilling terror the old-fashioned way, but it still manages to have a depth of human feeling that isn’t the stock and trade of this type of genre fare.

A graduate of Mexico’s state-operated Centro de Capacitacion Cinematographica, Grau worked as a producer and production manager on Mexican features, documentaries and education programs for television before his directorial breakthrough. We Are What We Are bowed at last year Director’s Fortnight in Cannes before premiering stateside at last fall’s New York Film Festival. It opens domestically from IFC this friday.

“We Are What We Are” director Jorge Michel Grau
Filmmaker: Your film builds very gradually, with a sort of slow burn rhythm that is popular on the festival circuit, but still somewhat unusual for the horror genre. How would you describe your approach to and inspirations from the universe of horror films?

Grau: I grew up watching horror films. What I wanted to deal with in this film was the disintegration of a family within a framework borrowed from the horror genres, but actually this is the experience of living in Mexico City. You can be living inside your home and outside of you; you’re surrounded by a situation that’s pretty much like that of a horror film. There are quite a number of cinematic references within the film to the genre of horror films or a cinema of violence,because that’s what I’m interested in. One of the obvious references in the film is to Guillermo Del Toro’s first film Cronos. That’s my approach to horror films, that’s the why I choose to shoot the film the way I did.

Filmmaker: Your depiction of corruption on all levels and within seemingly every institution of Mexico City life is quite striking. From the family to the police to the streets, no one seems to be untouched by a sense of collapse, by a loss of civic mindedness and social integrity.

Grau: What I want to talk about by looking at the disintegration of the family structure is to also talk about how tribal structures have become a form of survival for people in Mexico. Whether you belong to the police force or a tribe of prostitutes or the tribe of the family, it’s sort of a necessary way to get by in Mexico City. In that same process, I wanted to observe how that same process leads to those same tribes preying on each other in order to make it, in order to survive.

Mexico is on the verge of an abyss. Authority has eroded, we have this very brutal drug war, and people have a sense of the country drifting because of the violence and lack of control. That’s one thing people get out of the film, that there’s a social commentary aspect to it. You get the sense that the police force is preying upon the rest of society, but even within that tribe of the police force, the members are preying upon one another within it. That part of what I wanted to convey about what’s happening in Mexican society today.

Filmmaker: The film is at once a deadly serious film about cannibalism, which you play straight, never for easy laughs, and yet it has these wonderfully conceived parodic elements concerning the larger societal malaise in Mexico. Was that a hard balance to find in both the writing and the directing of the picture?

Grau: I wanted to underline the realism of the film so that when viewers would watch the film they’d say, “those are cannibals,” but also “this is a family trying to survive.” I wanted the story of cannibalism to be very serious and dramatic so that people would say, “Well, that’s the way it is.” That part of the story was so serious that I wanted to give it breathing space to the viewer by coming up with some of these comical situations, whether it’s the situation in the morgue or the relationship of the police officers. In Mexico we have a habit of making fun out of tragedy, so that at first people are suffering but then two weeks later there are 200 jokes about whatever tragic situation occurred. I devised in it a way so that the Mexican audience could identify; this sort of cultural identity of Mexicans would be reflected in the film. As the story is told, I wanted to them to encounter very serious situations and follow that with something that would make them laugh and then really hit them with something very strong so that they would suddenly feel a complete void following those drastic shifts.

Filmmaker: What’s the financing situation for a film like this? Are Mexican cannibalism movies a hard sale?

Grau: This film was made thanks to a program in the film school that helps first-time filmmakers make a film. There’s a prize of $700,000. I decided to participate in the contest because I was sure no one else would give me the money to make this film. The conditions for earning the prize was that neither the producer, director or cameraman would have previously worked on a feature film and the director of the film was not to earn any money, get a salary, get paid. That’s how this film was made. The film belongs the the film school.

Filmmaker: How did go about casting this family? They are both terrifying, monsters really, but also completely plausible as a struggling, working class Mexican family.

Grau: The only rule I set upon myself was to find actors who were about the age of the characters. The first actor I found was Francisco Barreiro, the protagonist of the film. I did some casting with Francisco present. I wasn’t so much interested in the look of the actors as I was the dynamic that was created by their interaction. Paulina Gaitan showed up for one of the castings and through Paulina I met the late Alan Chavez, who recently died after finishing the film. The three of them became very good friends. They had superb chemistry. That helped me enormously in working with them. Once I had the three kids, I went to look for an actress to play the mother and many actresses rejected the project, but I was lucky enough to find Carmen Beato and she fell in love with the project.

Once I had the actors, I sent them to morgues to see autopsies, to learn how instruments are used to break people’s bones. Then a week before shooting began, we locked ourselves away in room about the size of this one to generate that feeling of claustrophobia.

Filmmaker: Did you keep them there the whole week?

Grau: Yes, I was with them for an entire week.

Filmmaker: What did you do with them?

Grau: I wanted to generate a bond with them and among them, but I also wanted them to feel completely isolated from the rest of the world. By living together in a space where they had to eat together, go to the bathroom together, it can generate with the utter lack of privacy, a certain friction and hatred among them, so that then they could be able to live the experience of the characters, who love each other intensely but greatly desire to escape one another and remove themselves from the family structure.

Filmmaker: Was that difficult for them?

Grau: Yes is it was difficult for them. They got along very well at the beginning. That’s when they were only seeing each other at rehearsals. Once they started living together, tensions began to emerge. They realized that they didn’t actually like each other as much as they had originally thought. That’s what I wanted. To get that sense of hatred and dislike for each other out of each of them as the characters.

Filmmaker: What were the circumstances of Alan’s death?

Grau: He was killed by the police.

Filmmaker: Wow. That’s terrible.

Grau: [It happened] about two months after we completed shooting. His identity in real life was similar to that of the character in the film — he was abandoned by his mother, he had no father, he had no education beyond high school and had been living alone since age sixteen. He had been making money as an actor, but he was living out of control. He surrounded himself with people who were not good for his well being. He had this altercation with the police and was killed.

Filmmaker: Did he get a chance to see the film before he died?

Grau: He was an actor with enormous potential. In his short life he made nine movies and in that short time was twice nominated for Mexico’s equivalent to the Oscars. He was a revelation as an actor. I enjoyed enormously working with him. I sensed his potential, but I also sensed that his life was out of control. I tried to help him get his life together, I had the sense that his life was out of control and I wanted to put him to work on my next movie. I didn’t manage to help him in the end. He turned eighteen during production.

Filmmaker: Do you plan to revisit the horror genre?

Grau: Given the chance, I’d happy to make another horror film. Representation of violence fascinates me and the horror film is a site in which one can explore that.

HEALTH :: DIE SLOW :: MUSIC VIDEO

2011-04-15T12:20:00.000-05:00

adidas is all in

2011-04-15T11:44:00.000-05:00

austin tv

2011-04-14T14:44:00.001-05:00

World Cinema Showcase de Nueva Zelanda

2011-04-14T10:03:00.000-05:00

Why should a family who feast together on human meat be any less dysfunctional than others? In a household of cannibals suddenly bereft of its principal hunter and gatherer, three teenagers face a grisly learning curve. Mother’s not making it any easier with her hysterical opposition to the unclean flesh of prostitutes. Cruising the discothèque is nerve-wracking enough for barely out-of-the-closet Alfredo without mother and siblings back home preparing to ritualistically consume the object of his desire…

Inspired, for sure, by the seam of social satire in the zombie world of George Romero, Jorge Michel Grau, the latest of the new generation of Mexican writer/directors, conjures a murky nightmare of domestic angst, hormonal confusion, societal decadence and dire necessity.

“Surely cinema’s first Mexican social-realist cannibal horror drama, it’s grimly funny and at times horribly effective stuff. Ickily excellent.” — Adam Smith, Empire

Buffalo 66'

2011-04-11T01:00:00.001-05:00

The Tree of Life Movie Trailer Official (HD)

2011-03-30T10:52:00.000-06:00

Spacemen 3 - "Revolution" Taang! Records

2011-03-27T13:03:00.000-06:00

Tamaryn - Light Shadows / Love Fade

2011-03-21T20:33:00.000-06:00

JORGE MICHEL GRAU, DIRECTOR DE SOMOS LO QUE HAY

2011-03-17T23:08:00.000-06:00

Taboos: 'We Are What We Are'

2011-03-14T12:06:00.001-06:00

We Are What We Are wants to tweak the conventions of the typical thriller, to explore ideas and territories that usually ride as subplots or subtext.

Cannibalism - the last great taboo. Sure, one can argue over incest, molestation, or any number of equally abhorrent relevant social stigmas, but for some reason, the eating of human flesh still draws some of the loudest cries of communal blasphemy. There is no etiquette strong enough to suggest its acceptability, and entire horror franchises have been built out of the notion of people (living and/or dead) snacking on their fellow man. So what does it say about the sensational Mexican genre effort We Are What We Are that cannibalism is the least concerning element among the population of a nameless urban ghetto. Whores are more hated, as are homosexuals. In fact, the police actually laugh off yet another case of the poor eating each other. Solving the death of a prostitute? That’s far more important. That could lead to a promotion.

For Sabina, Alfredo, and Julian, the passing of their father couldn’t come at a worse time. The “ritual” is upon them, and without his guidance and corporal input, the clan fears the oncoming ‘shakes’. With their mother at wicked wit’s end, the oldest, Alfredo, is put in charge. Along with his hot tempered brother, they head out to kidnap a local urchin. When that doesn’t work, they beat and abduct a hooker. This makes their mother furious, since it was street walkers that were her husband’s downfall and put a strain on her marriage. Eventually, the three teens take control. Alfredo cruises the local gay scene while his siblings suggest something more scandalous is going on. With the police more or less ambivalent to their various crimes - but very concerned about the losses in the red light district - the family must fulfill their meat-eating mandate, or suffer the ambiguous consequences.

There are no answers in Where Are What We Are, only inferences and implications. The ritual everyone complains about is never fully explained. Neither is the slum style homestead overloaded with boxes of salt (?) and broken down clocks. Sure, when we first meet Alfredo and Julian, they are taking over their fallen father’s watch repair stall at the flea market and the seasoning might have something to do with packing and preserving their “prey”, but the allusion to time, and the impending ‘sacrifice’, are only minor aspects of this otherwise spellbinding film. We Are What We Are wants to tweak the conventions of the typical thriller, to explore ideas and territories that usually ride as subplots or subtext. As a creepy coming of age, we watch as three youths struggle to find their place in the family freakshow. Julian just wants to kill while Sabina manipulates and manages. That just leave Alfredo, afraid of his domineering mother and more than a little intrigued by the gay man he pursues and picks up.

In this backwards world of disenfranchisement, hookers are a persecuted victims’ pool and yet more respected than the homeless waifs gathered under the overpass. Morticians mock the discovery of a finger inside a corpse’s belly, arguing for its financial value over its social relevance (“there always eating each other out there…”). The police are made up of several corrupt tiers, each trying to outmaneuver the others for promotion and profit. Even the death of the father by poisoning (another legitimate loose thread) is skimmed over, suggesting a great deal but offering little in response. But one of the great things that writer/director Jorge Michel Grau does is make all these unanswered questions work. They become elements of the atmosphere, of suspense and suspicion, drawing us in and keeping us engaged, even as the characters glowers at each other in endless resentment.

The acting is universally good, the young performers finding the right balance between sinister and savant. Even the mother manages to make her over the top rants feel realistic and organic. This is, after all, a world where there are no recognizable rules, where meat is murder and visa versa. During a crucial moment in the last act, Sabina struggles to vivisect a body. Unable to control her urges, she grabs the corpse’s leg and begins munching like an animal. It’s what we’ve expected the entire time, like the payoff when Leatherface finally revs up his power tools. But in We Are What We Are, there is an anticlimactic element to the feast, since it really isn’t why we are investigating these people. There is more terror in mother’s various illogical screeds than in a young girl chewing on a dead man’s calf.

That’s the magic of this movie, a fright flick that actually thrives on breaking convention. There is blood and gore here, but not in the amounts the premise suggest. There are also scenes of sexual discovery, again, not in the quantities that turns things into exploitation. While some might consider this the cinematic equivalent of pulling punches, Grau is actually onto something more unsettling. He understands that audiences are primed for a certain kind of shock value when they come to a film like this. By feeding that need and then taking away the scary movie sustenance, he’s like the failed father figure, leaving the viewer shaken and starved for more. He then gives just enough to satisfy before slinking off, leaving many disquieting questions in his wake.

Yet again that’s the beauty of We Are What We Are. It’s a more glaring, grotesque portrait of modern Mexico than any documentary or well-meaning news report. What we learn is more shocking than what we see, though one does have to admit that most of the information is being skewed through a standard horror film milieu. Still, the portrait is there, painting in blots of crimson red and decaying gray. As the members of mall society swing past a dying peasant, as the shopping center staff step in to quickly dispense with (and clean up after) the bleeding body, we understand the entire “us vs. them” mentality at play. We Are What We Are is not just a new world order nightmare, it’s a statement of intent. Acceptance is up to the audience, not those locked in the lost land of death and human food.

Rating: 8/10

Andante - SXSW 2011 Accepted Film

2011-03-13T13:40:00.000-06:00

Glasser "Apply"

2011-03-12T23:51:00.000-06:00

The Knife - Live - Heartbeats

2011-03-12T23:41:00.000-06:00

Fever Ray 'When I Grow Up'

2011-03-12T23:35:00.000-06:00

Dirty Projectors - Stillness Is The Move (2009)

2011-03-12T23:34:00.000-06:00

The xx - Islands

2011-03-12T23:30:00.000-06:00

Tamaryn - Dawning (Official)

2011-03-12T23:20:00.000-06:00

Tamaryn - Love Fade (Official)

2011-03-12T23:15:00.000-06:00

Darkstar : Gold (Hyperdub 2010)

2011-03-10T13:51:00.000-06:00

We Are What We Are Reviewed by Chris Cabin

2011-03-09T17:24:00.000-06:00

Ambiguity has often proven to be the key component of great horror, from the bleak ending of John Carpenter's The Thing to the identity and questionable existence of the ghostly black-haired terrorizer in Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's Inside. And in the case of Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are, lack of exposition and an air of genuine confusion are key to the film's modest successes. This sense of beguilement is palpable from the moment the film opens with what looks like a homeless straggler wandering an upscale mall in Mexico City before collapsing to the ground, hacking up tar-black liquid and dying. It's only when an autopsy is performed and a lady's finger is removed from the man's stomach that a beacon points to where Grau, who also provided the script, is heading.

But even before the autopsy is performed, sending two loser cops on a quest for public glory, the essential mystery of the man in the mall is confounded by the introduction of his family. His two sons man a booth at the local market advertising watch repairs and selling jewelry, but an altercation between a costumer and the younger brother, Julian (Alan Chavez), rouses the proprietors of the market to call in a debt that they cannot pay. The eldest sibling, Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro), is more of the brooding type, a demeanor not helped when his sister, Sabina (Miriam Balderas), breaks the news about poppa and insists that Alfredo must become the family's leader and find someone for the "ritual."

The exact purpose of the ritual is never disclosed but the family's unique appetite gradually becomes crystal clear. Grau's intentions, however, are not simply to induce horror from the sight of a few cannibals chowing down on helpings of tender human thigh meat but to draw attention to the depleted humanity and morally bankrupt social structure that is commonplace in modern-day Mexico. We Are What We Are in fact has much more to do with American Psycho than it does The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, although it has a grubby, grisly atmosphere somewhat similar to the latter. The cops decide to investigate on the hopes of meeting the president and their interest in a hooker's brutal death is null until the promise of some time with an underage street-walker is offered. Kidnappings and beatings are daily occurrences that are ignored; homeless children form gangs underneath highways and bridges; incest lacks all but the faintest whiff of taboo.

In this climate, a family that feasts on one unlucky cab driver is barely negligible, but they won't eat just anything. There are strong notes of religious satire here when the mother chastises her children and her deceased husband for bringing home prostitutes and homosexual men home to eat. The latter plays a particularly fascinating part in an excellent sequence that sees Alfredo following a pack of flirtatious club boys to an underground dance club, where it becomes impossible to differentiate whether it is his hunger or sexual urges that both allure and disgust him. All hell breaks loose when Alfredo returns home with a young man at the same time that his mother brings home the aforementioned cab driver, whom she lured home after a quickie in his backseat, leading to the film's vicious climax.

Uneven as it is, We Are What We Are is a delightful bit of grotesque black humor, well performed by its actors and smartly paced by Grau, who shows admirable restraint by only dabbling in gore and sanguinary catharsis. The sequel-baiting ending fails to entice but it again offers an ambiguous ellipsis rather than a simple period, though to be fair even the most cut-and-dry endings could spawn sequels nowadays. So though Grau's promising debut doesn't announce itself as a new classic as thunderously as Let the Right One In or [rec], it nevertheless has the potential to haunt you with images much harder to wash away than the puddles of necrotic fluid mopped up by a mall custodian, who looks at a corpse with no less ambivalence than those who run his country.

2

2011-03-05T23:58:00.001-06:00

Por un momento pensé que podría ser cierto.
El reflejo en tus lentes oscuros me dio esa certeza.

Jorge Michel Grau Talks We Are What We Are

2011-03-05T22:31:00.001-06:00

We Are What We Are depicts to what extent people will go to survive in the decaying, violent slums of Mexico. Director Jorge Michel Grau knows of this struggle first hand, having grown up in the nation's dark recesses: streets filled with gang violence, drug wars, and inconceivable poverty. His film acts as a visceral metaphor for these grim realities, complete with cannibalism family, a decaying City backdrop, and graphic violence and mutilation. Here, “home” — that is, the family, the tribe, and its rituals — can save you from being swallowed up completely by the Hell surrounding you.

Heather Buckley: How does your film reflect the state of Mexico?

Jorge Michel Grau: What I want to convey is the sense that in current Mexican society, everyone pretty much is left to their own devices to survive because of the social disintegration and the violence, the rampant, brutal violence that is ongoing now as a result of the drug war. But also, in this process of trying to survive, people are creating small tribes, which help them with their process of survival as they create systems of protection for individuals. And so through the metaphor of the tribes, I would also develop the theme of cannibalism in the way that man’s only predator is another human being. In the film, the stronger tribe preys upon the weaker one. So some of the weaker tribes in society, such as the homeless children, prostitutes and gays, these would be the natural prey for the stronger tribes, in this case, this family.

HB: When did you decide that this metaphor would be best expressed using the horror genre?

JMG: First of all, I love horror films, I grew up watching horror films of the 1970’s but, I wanted to make a story about the disintegration of the family and social disintegration as well, and that is pretty much what is developed in the first part of the film. Then there is a sudden turn towards horror, because I thought it would be a context and framework that would work well. And partly because it would reflect this sense of society surrounded by violence. In Mexico, if I am inside my house, I am protected, but the moment I walk out, I’m open to attacks and aggression all around me.

HB: What is your attraction to the genre?

JMG: What I like about horror is its elasticity, its capacity for expansion, so you could include elements from other genres within a horror film, for instance, humor, and in my case I also wanted to add drama. So that is actually what I really like about it, the possibilities of horror, that you can open it up and insert other styles and feelings.

HB: Do you want to continue to make a horror films or do you want to make things outside the genre?

JMG: I don’t know. What I’m really more drawn to is the cinema of violence. Along the lines of Sam Peckinpah, or Miike, where it’s really more the violence rather than the frightening—that’s what draws me to the genre, that with the aesthetic of gore, you can explore the genre of violence.

HB: What is your attraction to violence as an artistic expression?

JMG: I grew up in the neighborhood where the film takes place, and it was a very violent neighborhood, and I lived with that violence all throughout my childhood and teenage years, and I’ve gotten used to that, those levels of violence, I feel very comfortable relating to the people. It’s a type of community where the violence is sort of endemic, or internalized. Parents beat their kids, brothers beat each other up, so violence sort of comes natural to the way that I look at the world, and I make films.

Chew on this by V.A. Musetto

2011-03-04T10:18:00.001-06:00

It's always tough when a family loses its father. But it's especially difficult when that family's made up of cannibals and the dad's the one who finds the people they eat. That's the quandary faced by the lower-class family in "We Are What We Are," the first feature by Mexican writer-director Jorge Michel Grau.

The morbidly funny art-house horror tale opens with the middle-aged father coughing up blood and dying in a Mexico City shopping mall.

At the morgue, an attendant discovers an undigested human finger in the dead man's stomach. "It's shocking how many people eat each other in this city," he tells an inept police detective, though Grau doesn't explore the possibility of epidemic cannibalism.

The death leaves the deceased's wife, two teenage sons and a daughter to fend for themselves. The task of shopping for dinner falls to the younger son, a closeted homosexual who finds victims among female hookers and gay hustlers.

"I'm not eating a fag," the second son says when his bro brings home a guy he picked up in a gay club. "You'll eat what I tell you to," is the reply.

"We Are What We Are" has its grisly moments, for sure. But unlike Hollywood splatter-fests like "Saw," it's more than just senseless violence.

Grau's script is intelligent, and it has something to say about family and social dysfunction. You just might want to skip meat for a few days.

“Oh, God, Mother! Blood! Blood!” Ryan Wells

2011-03-03T12:46:00.000-06:00

What pleasant fluff! We have a Mexican family of five initially, and then down by one after the father finds himself victim of poisoning by a prostitute (who apparently wasn’t a fan of his charms), who for ritual’s sake enjoy gnawing on the bones of human victims brought to the pack by Dad. The father’s sudden demise and the subsequent aftermath sets the premise for Jorge Michel Grau’s feature debut, “We Are What We Are.” And while it opens with one of the finest sequences in recent cinematic memory, it closes with a forgettable, unfortunate whisper.

“We Are What We Are” works as a smorgasbord of horror plot devices: the ghoulish, frantic mother, the slightly incestuous sibling rivalry, urban violence, corrupt police officers, meta-homophobia, ticked-off trannies, the methodical persistence of ritual, the eventual exposure of madness. It’s all there. Frankly, what is not is the gore. Considering the premise there’s not much to shudder about which admittedly is a disappointment given what was promised.

Our heart of “We Are What We Are” is the mother, played with the exquisite intensity of a love starved cobra by Carmen Beato. After the death of the father, who appeared to do little more than “sleep with sluts” and make overtures at fixing watches at a local market stand, the mother dives into shock and then hatred particularly over the “ritual” that her children are so hell bent on carrying on with clockwork precision. As the mother lies comatose in her room, the teenage children—particularly the two males—divvy up the killing and it looks like the oldest brother (cold, cold Francisco Barreiro) is blessed and cursed as tasked to bring home the bacon, so to speak. The first attempt is wretchedly bad as they swoop in on some children hoping to snag a morsel. The second is more successful though this kind of meat is forbidden by the mother considering her deceased husband’s unhealthy relationship with it. Her children pay no heed to this, striking a defying decision against her; and soon after begin the steady decline and demise of the family through a series of reckless and stupid variations on the theme of the Hunt.

I mentioned the opening sequence and it’s a stunner. No words are mentioned as the camera sets on the top of an escalator and waits for the dying father (Humberto Yáñez) to reach the top. As he slumbers through the mall holding his stomach and gasping for life he’s ignored by all the other inhabitants in a haunting display of spectrality in the flesh. He’s suddenly enraptured by a pair of female mannequins in a shop window. And upon seeing his own reflection goes into a spastic fit coughing up black blood and finally collapsing into death. Count to five and you have the mall custodian crew swooping in to grab the dead man’s limbs and dragging him off camera, and a mop and bucket conveniently in line to make a pass at the blood. All traces of whatever just happened are erased with a kind of severe social disavowment that feels like a distant cousin to the final scene in “Chinatown.”

Speaking of unhealthy relationships with one’s parent, the most obvious influence seeping through “We Are What We Are” is “Psycho.” And while this is always a treat to see social outcasts suddenly bare their tentacles in public and snag a poor unsuspecting Marion Crane type in order to meet their demons there wasn’t as much dramatic flair that one should come to expect in a film released in 2011 that’s had 51 years to perfect the theme. Even down to the Detective Arbogast allusions and the sister’s obvious lack of a moral center at the film’s end – it’s all so very disappointingly pastiche and so swiftly, yet sloppily deployed. And sure, some of us may be in on the joke but there’s a point when how about giving us something black without the comedy, reliably always having to play the third wheel.

Regardless of the overt flaws in Grau’s shock tapestry, it’s still 90 minutes of delightful viewing, particularly when set alongside another recent, and dreadfully bad, genre offering “The Roommate.”

Interview. February 20th, 2011 by John in Interviews

2011-03-01T12:53:00.001-06:00

Ioncinema got one of the top independent directors in the world to share about his craft and the mind bending film he just made.

We are What we are is directed by Mexican helmer Jorge Michel Grau. The film tries to break the early clichés of genre movie by stepping into a whole new territory.

The film deals with the subject of cannibalism. The film tells the story of a monstrous wife, ghoulish daughter and two troubled sons. They all bicker about who will go and get the family groceries for them. Tell us what you think of this film and write to us about the moral issues it challenges.

Film Review: We Are What We Are 25 February 2011 by Marc Patterson

2011-03-01T12:49:00.000-06:00

I’d be hard pressed to admit the last time I looked forward to seeing a new cannibal film. Most of today’s riff’s on this classic sub-genre of horror are merely third rate TCM knock-off’s going for the gross-out factor and forgetting any nuance of horror or story-telling along the way. Can you imagine my shock when I caught wind of We Are What We Are, a film that emphasizes substance over gore and cannibalism? Though don’t be fooled, cannibalism is what this film is about.

The opening moments of Jorge Michel Grau’s film are powerful enough to want to make one stop dead in their tracks and discuss before moving into the film any further. An older man, sick, possibly confused stumbles though an upscale mall in Mexico City. He’s generally ignored by those around him, and when he pauses at a shop to stare at the mannequins in the window is shooed away by an indignant shopkeeper who quickly takes out a rag and cleans the glass where the man laid his hands. The man shortly thereafter begins coughing up blood and promptly collapses and dies. No one stops to help, or to even call for help. Only two maintenance workers quickly and promptly arrive to remove the body and mop up the mess. This is our silent dialogue-free introduction to We Are What We Are. A scene packed full of sub-text and meaning, an opener ripe for discussion.

As we move into the film proper we are introduced to this man’s family, his wife and three grown children, a dysfunctional family full of strife that falls further out of sorts when they learn of their father’s death. The death seems to complicate an important, yet unexplained ritual they must attend to, that of procuring meat for the table, a matter they treat with near religious fervor. The man’s children, Sabina, Julien, and Alfredo take that leap from being teen-aged children who follow the direction of their father implicitly, to being forced to make their own decisions, sometimes in defiance of their lunatic mother.

When they chose a street prostitute as their victim to be (something that is taboo and unworthy) the balance of power between the mother and her children begins to sway on near catastrophe. Complicating matters are two inept detectives who are alerted to the discovery of a human finger in the stomach of the father, leading them to track down this family of cannibals in hopes of a big promotion. Incest, homosexuality, prostitution and some serious Oedipus complexes are all themes toyed with at varying levels in this complicated and layered story of survival in a decaying city.

The dialogue in the film is strikingly sparse adding minimal flavor to a meal that is better served up visually, and to that end the film is truly a visual treat with cinematography that is gorgeous while simultaneously exuding the bleak backdrop of an impoverished community. In fact, at one turn, during the scene in the morgue I’m reminded of Guillermo Del Toro’s freshman masterpiece, Cronos. It was as if Grau was giving a direct nod towards his Mexican predecessor in more ways than one.

If one word could summarize We Are What We Are I’d call it depressing. The film is presented with absolute moral ambivalence and I still don’t know, after a full day since viewing it, whether or not I like it. Perhaps therein lies its brilliance, in that it can make one contemplate it long after the credits roll and still unsure of how to feel about it. For me, my most curious instincts are still wrestling on whether or not I should empathize with the at the one piece of uplifting propaganda spread from a subway convert, a simple piece of paper exclaiming “You are alive”.

New In Theaters – Review Of Mexican Cannibalism Drama “We Are What We Are” By Tambay, on February 17th, 2011

2011-02-26T17:10:00.000-06:00

It opens in limited theaters tomorrow, Friday, the 18th (check your local listings), courtesy of IFC Films; I saw it last year at the New York Film Festival, and wrote a review afterward. And since it’s opening for the general public tomorrow, I thought I’d repost my review of it, so here ya go…

It’s a cool premise, I thought, when I initially heard about We Are What We Are (Somos Lo Que Hay), and was even more anxious to see it, when its first trailer turned up online. A family of cannibals, in present-day Mexico city, is left lacking, wildly anxious, after the sudden death of its patriarch; the widow and her three teenage children are in a frenzy to continue a family tradition that involves the hunting and gathering of fresh human meat.

Not that I was expecting something gruesome, and salivating at the thought of it; I like a good blood and gore flick every now and then, but nothing I’d seen and read about this particular film led me to believe that it would fall under that category. It’s more of a slow-burning suspense drama – a visually accomplished feature film debut for Jorge Michel Grau that laconically narrates a story about survival, set in the seedier sections of Mexico’s largest, densest city.

There’s very little actual violence, and much of it happens off camera; but when it does, it’s unmistakable and undeniable.

Running at about 100 minutes, the first 60 or so minutes of it are captivating; quietly suspenseful, as one works to make sense of each development, anticipating the next. As I said in my preview review 2 days ago, an engaging buildup that promises a potentially bizarre (in a good way) family drama. And yes, I said “drama;” One would immediately expect something closer to a piece of Eli Roth masturbatory fiction, in being introduced to a film about a family of cannibals, and, as I already said, there is some of that in the film; but, really, this is a film about a family and its will to survive against tremendous odds.

Director Grau should have maintained his focus on the collection of emotional, unexpected series of events and circumstances introduced in that first hour – the death of the father, the unraveling of the mother, the revelation that the oldest son is gay and his struggle to assume the role now vacant thanks to the death of the father, the hinted-at sexual tension between the younger son and the precocious daughter, the group’s conflicting ideas on how they will now survive, and a bit more, as if all that’s not already enough.

Instead Grau seemingly gives up, or rather gives in to Hollywood conventions, by mixing in an unconvincing narrative about a police officer, disrespected by his peers, and his quest to silence his detractors by solving the unsolvable (identifying the cannibals). It feels tacked on, as if Grau wasn’t confident that the family drama would be enough to sustain the film and keep audiences engaged, or that doing so might hurt its release prospects, reducing its reach. But what the subplot does is cheapen the film. Some in the audience I saw it with laughed at certain derivative tail-end sequences that I doubt were meant to be comical.

Performances are convincing; riveting even; the fractured mother’s fast-decline, seemingly wrestling with uncertainties; the timid, sensitive (although cliched) gay eldest son’s ambivalence in succeeding his father as leader of the pack, and how he eventually finds the will and courage to overcome his fears and win the respect of the others; the mature young daughter, the heart of the family, and most rational, who understands her position in the hierarchy, even though she’d be the ideal leader; and lastly, the combative youngest son, fearless, and rambunctious, who’d probably love to succeed, but is automatically disqualified because of his age. The cast eats up the material (pun intended), and I believed their performances, even as the narrative dives.

I appreciate how Grau throws us right into the story, with little explanation of when and where exactly we are. There’s no explanation as to why this family that exists in a world not so unlike ours, are cannibals, or how long they’ve been as they are, although there are hints that they aren’t alone. There’s no scene or sequence of birth or transformation, as we’d see in vampire and zombie movies, for example. No one is bitten or infected in some other intravenous manner. The film begins, and we’re asked to just accept that these people are who they are (as the title suggests), and your willingness to tolerate this will influence your appreciation for the film.

There’s also frequent mention of some kind of time-sensitive ritualistic rite of passage – a passing of the baton from father to oldest son, I presumed – that involves human sacrifice, but, unless I just missed it entirely, we’re never really given an explanation of what exactly this ritual is, and why it’s crucial that it must be performed so urgently. However, I wasn’t entirely distracted by this lack of awareness. I accepted it.

In closing, there was certainly more than enough dramatic meat to feed this monster, and I wish Grau had explored the less obviously, easily seductive aspects of the overall narrative; instead, it’s all upstaged by second half, 3rd-rate police theater, and unfortunately so, because I was completely enthralled for much of the terse, well-acted, visually stark, searing first half buildup, hoping for a worthy pay-off. It was disappointing actually.

However, as I also said in my preview, I’ll take this disappointment over a lot of the studio films I’ve seen so far this year.

IFC Films picked the film up for stateside distribution; they’ll likely play up the blood and gore in marketing materials to draw audiences to theaters, but you’ve been warned to instead expect a slow-burning, character-driven narrative with very few splashes. If you go in expecting the former, you’d be disappointed. But despite my misgivings, I’d still recommend seeing it, if it comes your way.

Entrevista: Jorge Michel Grau, Somos lo que Hay

2011-02-25T23:46:00.000-06:00

Después de un recorrido por el circuito internacional de cine, Somos lo que Hay (IFC Films), ópera prima de Jorge Michel Grau se estrena en Estados Unidos. La cinta de caníbales mexicanos que luchan por la sobrevivencia, después que su padre y proovedor del alimento ha fallecido, sigue ganando adeptos y no por nada formó parte de nuestro Top 5 2010 del cine mexicano. Mientras Michel Grau estuvo en Nueva York presentando la cinta durante el New York Film Festival hace unos meses, pudimos hablar con él sobre su ópera prima, el cine de los años 70 y que piensa del público de nuestra caótica ciudad en la siguiente entrevista...

Christian Del Moral: Desde las primeras imágenes de Somos los que Hay, me recordó ese cine mexicano de los años 70...

Jorge Michel Grau: Sí claro, por supuesto...

CD: ¿Esa fue tu mayor influencia dentro de esta película?

JMG: Afortunadamente lo viste, hay muchas referencias en la película al cine de los 70, sin duda alguna. Mi padre tenía un videoclub, era su negocio cuando yo era niño y cuando entran las grandes cadenas de videoclubs, el negocio fracasó. Lo que hizo mi papá fue guardar todas las películas en mi sala y crecí viendo cine de los 70. Sin embargo, creo que ahora hacemos muy buen cine, pero el cine de los 70 en México es ícono para nosotros; es muy importante en el desarrollo del lenguaje y en el acercamiento a los personajes. Y Ripstein con El Castillo de la Pureza (1973) y Los Albañiles (1976) de Jorge Fons, son películas que me marcaron y que me hicieron cineasta digamos. Entonces evidentemente a la hora de filmar, las referencias salen casi en automático.

CD: Me pareció excelente, y me imagino que a mucha gente que no le ha gustado no tiene estas referencias o la noción de este cine, sobre las historias obscuras que incomodan y la desintegración familiar...

JMG: Diste en el clavo, es eso...

CD: En una entrevista dices que te sientes muy cómodo dentro de la violencia (como eje narrativa) y cuando estuve en la proyección pensé que mucha gente se saldría y no fue así. No fue tan violenta como muchos esperaban, ¿como lograste ese balance?

JMG: Yo crecí en esa barrio y ahí vive toda mi familia actualmente, a eso me refería (en la entrevista)...

CD: ¿Dónde es eso?

JMG: Es la CTM Culhuacán, al sur de la Ciudad de la Ciudad de México (Delegación Coyoacán). Y a eso me refería para decir que estaba cómodo, yo crecí ahí y la violencia era de todos los días, sobrevivir en la calle como uno podía. Cuando escribí el guión de la desintegración y esta pena y pulso que me gusta de la violencia me arriesgué sin ninguna pretensión digamos. No tenía la pretensión de que el público se quedará a verla, pero ni tampoco de correrlo, más bien no me preocupé por eso. Intenté plantear la historia bajo mis pocas herramientas como cineasta emergente y pues es mi primera película y exploración, así que no me limité y decidí que el cine que me gusta es ese de los 70, con esas referencias y eso era lo que haría porque me sentía seguro. Si a la gente le gustaba, la película iba a ser fantástico, y si no pues no habría funcionado.

CD: ¿Te ha sorprendido que ha tenido más resonancia en el extranjero, que dentro de la crítica en México?

JMG: De hecho el último país donde encontramos distribuidor fue en México... toda Europa la compró y había 17 países por estrenar, en Estados Unidos através de IFC Films y en México nadie se interesaba por la película hasta que hablamos con la gente de Canana, quienes la distribuirán...

CD: Había leído que algunos distribuidores decían no era apta para el público mexicano...

JMG: ¡Exactamente! La gran mayoría de los distribuidores nos decían 'esta película no va a funcionar', 'esta película no le va a gustar a los mexicanos', con un desdén hacia el cine mexicano triste.

CD: ¿Cómo fue el trabajo con los actores? ¿Hubo ensayos, qué tal fue?

JMG: Lo que hicieron fue un ensayo de mesa, más bien una lectura de guión y analizamos a los personajes y donde querían que llegaran. Lo único que ensayamos fueron evidentemente las peleas y cuando (el personaje de) Paulina (Gaitán) les dice: "mi papá falleció". Eso fue lo único que ensayamos y todo lo demás fue análisis de mesa. También hicimos ejercicios de campo, por decirlo de alguna manera, nos fuimos a morgues, fuimos a ver autopsias, a rastros de animales para ver como mataban a las reces y como las cargaban y destazaban para que se familiarizan con los instrumentos. Al final les pedí a los actores, la última semana antes de filmar, que se aislaran del mundo, que desconectaran su celular, se encerraran en sus casas, que no hablaran por teléfono con absolutamente nadie más que conmigo. Este ejercicio de aislamiento terminó cuando comenzó la filmación.

CD: El canalismo es solo un pretexto para hablar de múltiples temas, el role de la mujer en la familia, la orientación sexual, la corrupción política y de menores, ¿de dónde surge esta idea de cine social con el toque de cine fantástico?

JMG: Yo creía al principio que la mejor manera de poner la metáfora de la película en la película era obviarla. La metáfora que quiero manejar o que intento, es que el único depredador del ser humano es el ser humano mismo. Y que mejor metáfora que fueran caníbales, osea que se comieran a la gente y también el canibalismo como metáfora me daba muchas posibilidades que era el abuso de la minoría. Por ejemplo siempre hay un constante abuso al menor, al indefenso, en este caso la familia ataca a los niños de la calle o las prostitutas, pero los mismos polícias se atacan entre ellos y un policía con más jerarquía, agrede a su compañero. Y con todo este ejercicio social de corrupción policíaca, de las prostitutas regalando una niña con tal de que asesinen a alguien, que eso sudece en la vida real en México, eso es canibalismo entonces por eso me fui por esa vena o carril y todo iba embonando bien como en orden y al final somos caníbales.

CD: Se estrenó en Guadalajara casi hace un año, y me preguntó si lees las críticas de tu película. ¿Cómo creador qué opinas?

JMG: No sé de pronto hay críticas… en Guadalajara nos fue muy mal, las críticas locales hicieron pedazos a la película y no me molestaba pero como me desilusionaba un poco es que el crítico, el bloguero o el periodista no encontraban ningun valor en la película; entiendo perfectamente que no les gustó la combinación de géneros y lo acepto porque ese era el riesgo que estábamos corriendo pero personalmente creo que la foto era sensacional y nadie lo percibió... lo dejaron pasar, hasta hubo críticos que se burlaban de la película y hacían chistes como un escarnio, se me hizo una postura desmedida y pedantes de ellos, sin embargo, cuando la película regresa al Distrito Federal a Distrital la reacción del público y la crítica es completamente la opuesta…

CD: ¿O cuándo te invitaron a Cannes?

JMG: También sucede eso, regreso de Cannes y la gente la ve con otros ojos. Bueno al final, la película se ha ido labrando su propio camino y va a ancontrar su nice donde la gente la busque y le guste.

CD: Y ahora estás en Nueva York promocionado la película...

JMG: De hecho mi intención era terminar mi siguiente guión pero este tipo de festivales lo que me permite es la posibilidad de financiar mi próximo proyecto... este es mi último festival internacional para estar con la peli. Tengo guión casi terminado, muy cerca y veremos si podemos encontrar financiamiento en los dos próximos meses para comenzar a filmarlo en marzo.

CD: ¿Y sigues en esta misma línea?

JMG: Sí es muy parecida, con un comentario social mucho más obvio y también tiene unos toques de violencia fuertes.

CD: ¿Y qué tal te fue anoche con el público neoyorquino?

JMG: Me encantó ver la sala, y además es mi primera vez en Nueva York así que me estoy comiendo todo y si alguien hubiera hecho la película me hubiera encantado porque todo es novedad, todo bueno. Hasta donde pude ver, la gente reaccionó muy bien y eso me tranquilizaba, bueno no es cualquier festival, digo es uno de los festivales más importantes del mundo con un público muy exigente que puede perfectamente puede botar la película. Pero ahí estaban y hubo una buena sesión de preguntas y respuestas.

Somos lo que Hay se estrena mañana en IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue at West Third Street)

Mexico City Cannibals Prowl for Snacks in We Are What We Are By J. Hoberman

2011-02-25T23:38:00.002-06:00

The tale of a disoriented cannibal family trying to survive in the lower depths of Mexico City, Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are is a darkly comic social allegory as well as an atmospheric little genre flick. This promising first feature is nearly as apt to use the power of suggestion as to ladle up the gore, triumphantly creepy, and just arty enough to have secured a slot in last year’s New York Film Festival.

Grau’s opening scene is good enough to anthologize. A wild-eyed, bearded, obviously sick middle-aged man staggers up out of the subway into an early-morning shopping street, stares hungrily at some bikini-clad shop-window mannequins, collapses on the sidewalk, vomits black bile, and dies. Passers-by are oblivious and the cleanup is all but instant; later, at the morgue, a medic discovers an undigested human finger in the corpse’s stomach. “You’d be amazed how many people eat people in this city,” he tells a cop.

The case of the missing finger is never solved; the rest of We Are What We Are concerns the dead man’s absence. Without him, his family-cum-cult—two 20-ish sons (one volatile, the other depressed), plus a sultry teenage daughter and a scary, haggard wife—are not sure how to feed themselves or continue what they call “the Ritual.” Dad, who paid the rent on their dank, dark basement by repairing watches, was also the one who brought home the (human) bacon, to be ceremonially butchered and sloppily devoured. Now his squabbling, resentful, mutually jealous, and increasingly ravenous survivors are left to their own dubious devices.

Who are these unspeakably sordid people holed up in a drab, working-class neighborhood (the same one where Grau, whose father owned a video store, grew up)? Are they los ricos, los pobres, capitalist exploiters, social parasites, an atavistic Aztec sect, metaphors for Mexico’s self-devouring drug wars? Don’t look for logic. They are who they are, and mainly: They hungry! As a narrative, We Are What We Are is all about the logistics of feeding the beast. What would Dad have done? How do you snatch a homeless kid or snare an unwary hooker? Is it possible to lure a lustful trick back home for dinner—especially when home is a horror pit of guttering candles, dripping blood, and eternally ticking clocks?

In addition to a comment on what Nick Schager, in his Voice interview with Grau last September, termed the “societal food chain,” We Are What We Are is also an accelerated telenovela. The family’s need for fresh meat is greatly complicated by their long-simmering interpersonal dynamics. Sibling rivalry runs rampant, fueled by maternal rejection, repressed homosexuality, and incestuous desire. Meanwhile, a clownish pair of cops—dreaming of tabloid glory and blissfully unaware that this case is way beyond their ken—furnish a bit of comic relief. Although We Are What We Are is far from sentimental, Grau’s focus on the family’s vulnerability serves to implicate the spectator in their struggle to survive.

So tasty a premise seems destined for a Hollywood remake. (Perhaps someone will merge it with Oscar-friendly family drama: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Mark Wahlberg playing the somewhat over-aged kids; Melissa Leo reprising her role as the mom from hell.) It will be difficult, however, to find an equivalent ambience. Once under way, We Are What We Are is a long journey through an urban miasma to the end of a dark and bloody night, a modernist score adding to the anxiety around the invariably messy kills. This is a movie in which mise-en-scène trumps the suspense.

Played out in shadowy streets, dilapidated overhead highways, grime-encrusted underpasses, and fetid clubs, We Are What We Are seems an organic product of Mexico City’s teeming sprawl. (There’s a hint of Buñuel’s Los Olvidados in its life-feeding-on-life Darwinian struggle.) The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls—or rather tonelessly chanted on a rattling train in a sequence providing the movie’s appropriately off-key lyrical interlude as well as its ambiguous motto: “You are alive.”

Los adolescentes - Dënver

2011-02-24T19:37:00.000-06:00

Cannibal Holocaust: Interview With Filmmaker Jorge Michel Grau By Sami Khan

2011-02-22T09:46:00.001-06:00

Last spring, I met a friend to talk about his favorite movies from Cannes 2010, but all he wanted to talk about was Mexican cannibals.

My friend was impressed not by the art house heavy-hitters like Godard and Leigh but by a Mexican horror film by a first time director. The film, he said, was about a family of cannibals trying to fend for themselves after their father dies. It was called “We Are What We Are” written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Jorge Michel Grau.

When my friend is excited about a movie I know that it has to be important, and that was soon confirmed by Twitch Film’s rave review and the film’s subsequent screening at the even more selective New York Film Festival.

And after recently getting a chance to see the film for myself I have seen what all the fuss is about. Grau’s film is a dark, unsettling, terrifying and occasionally hilarious film about the disintegration of a family that just happens to be cannibals. It’s an empathic portrait of a fucked up family, trying desperately to survive in a world that’s out to get them. But unlike many other horror films these days “We Are What We Are” also focuses on the costs of the family’s violence and its toll on the victims. Like the best horror films of the 1970s (the movies of Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven and others), “We Are What We Are” actually has something to say about the wider world.

IFC Films released “We Are What We Are” late last week, and I had the chance to chat with Grau (along with my good friend Freddy, who did the translating).

-SK

After I watched “We Are What We Are”, what occurred to me was that this movie is really about endings – both the ending or climax of the film, which takes up maybe 50% of the screen time as well as the end of the family. What interests you about endings?
As many people know, drug trafficking and drug violence are huge problems in Mexico. Many people stay with their parents or another family member because they’re afraid of being alone. I wanted to explore what happens to a family when they lose their sole provider – when they lose their only means of sustenance and support. So it was important to me to tie the structure of the film to the disintegration of the family.

I think Richard Peña, in Film Comment, was the first one to draw a comparison to another Mexican film, Arturo Ripstein’s amazing 1973 movie “Castillo de la Pureza”, was that a conscious influence?
One of my favorite movies is “Castillo de la Pureza” and I really like Sergio Magaña’s play [about the same story] but there was no direct influence on my movie although there are some similarities between Ripstein’s film and mine. Particularly since they both feature families concealing part of the themselves. In “Castillo de la Pureza” the father conceals his family and in my film the family voluntarily decides to conceal themselves.

And, even though the play is from the 60s and the movie is from the 70s, both those works and my film are interested in families who’s lives revolve around work and repetition. Many of the Mexican plays I’ve seen and that I like are one’s that show the decomposition of the family and their separation from Mexican society.

One thing that “Castillo de la Pureza” and your film definitely share is that they root the source of violence in the family – not the police, not the lower class – but the family. Why did you make the decision?
A big percentage of families in Mexico are dysfunctional. They disintegrate very quickly and that has a lot to do with the disintegration of traditional values without the support of a strong social structure. Today in Mexico there’s the real possibility that when you go out for a drink or to any social place you’ll be confronted with decapitated human heads or a pigs head attached to a human body. That type of violence has permeated into the Mexican family and keeps them isolated. I’m not saying there’s this Manichean dichotomy between the order of the family and the chaos outside it, nor am I trying to be a moralist and say that the family is salvation. But it is true that, for better or worse, the disintegrated family is our social fabric – the core of our society.

I decided very early on that the movie had to be violent for a couple of reasons. One, because that’s what I see in Mexico today. Two, because I lived and was raised in the neighborhood where the characters live so this was my family. That neighborhood is still pretty much the same today the only difference is whether people are willing to leave their homes and go out and experience that type of violence. As a result, many of them stay concealed.

What neighborhood is that?
It’s called CTM Culhuacán. CTM stands for Confederacion de Trabajadores de Mexico – it’s a Mexican trade union. The neighborhood was built around the same time as Ripstein’s film came out. There’s a lot of architectural diversity in the neighborhood that’s one of the reasons I decided to shoot there but I also know it like the back of my hand, so that helps!

In the film the family is middle class but they aren’t comfortably middle class – they’re part of the lower middle class. Why was it important to you that they be this way?
I did some research on social classes in Mexico when I was writing the film. The family in my film are from the lower class but they are not from the lowest class in Mexico. We call that middle class and it’s really what makes up the bulk of people in Mexico City and really drives the city, economically and socially.

Some 75 to 80% of Mexicans live the same way the family in my movie lives. Typically, a family lives on one salary. Some families sell food in the streets or outside of their houses or they open up a little business right in front of their garage and sell stolen merchandise or buy merchandise from a store wholesale and they resell it marking it up 10%.

Is it true you are working on a cannibalism trilogy?
Not a cannibalism trilogy but a horror trilogy. One film will be about cannibalism, one will be about vampires and another will be about zombies – 1970s-style George Romero zombies not the kinds of zombies that are running around in movies today.

Your film played Cannes and the New York Film Festival and was picked up for US distribution by IFC Films – it’s one of the most successful first features released this year. Are you surprised your cannibal horror / family drama has achieved this much success?
[Laughs] Yes! And it’s ironic because I’m getting distribution for my film in America, in France, in Germany but I can’t get distribution for it in Mexico!

Lucrecia Martel: El sonido en la escritura y la puesta en escena

2011-02-22T00:34:00.000-06:00

Cinema con carne by Steve Dollar

2011-02-22T00:23:00.001-06:00

Everyone thinks they know what to expect from a genre exercise. Horror films have their codes. The subdivision of cannibal flicks, chalked off like a crime scene by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is its own peculiar terrain of terror. What do we talk about when we talk about Leatherface? The unknowable grotesque. Mutant derangement. Stupid kids. Smokehouse barbecue! Working south of the border, Mexican director Jorge Michael Grau approaches the subject with a fresh appetite.

We Are What We Are We Are What We Are—which flows off the tongue more poetically in the Spanish, Somos Lo Que Hay—brings the arthouse to the charnelhouse. Set in a shadowy precinct amid a Mexico City of decaying sprawl and fetid alleys, the film introduces the audience to the knowably grotesque, and not even quite that. It's more of suspense drama than a bug-eyed shocker, intent on humanizing the inhuman by emphasizing the primal necessities of a binding social structure and three squares a day. Only, in this case, the abiding unit is a family of flesh-eaters. The clan experiences a massive freakout when its patriarch collapses and dies on a city street. As the camera watches from a slight remove, the body is efficiently gathered up, blood washed away as if nothing ever happened. Only once the corpse is sliced open for an autopsy does it give up its secret: an undigested finger.

We Are What We Are This marvelous moment arouses the suspicion of a pair of buffoonish cops, who go off hot on the trail, as if—in a city where thousands of people vanish every year without a trace—it's really going to matter. Meanwhile, back in the dark apartment, the bereaved have little more than tears to sop up. By profession a clockmaker, the father also brought home the bacon in other ways: He did all the hunting and killing, presiding over a mysterious dining ritual that accompanied every slaughter. When mom (Carmen Beato) laments that her husband was ruined by his whores, she means it like most of us might disparage spicy food. But she can't keep a leash on Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro), the eldest, who determines to take charge of the family's needs, spawning a feud with his equally headstrong sister (Paulina Gaitan) and younger sib Julian (Alan Chavez) over various aspects of proper operating procedure. Grau insists on showing rather than telling, letting the gravity of the situation gradually accumulate meaning for the viewer.

We Are What We Are How exactly does one hunt a human? The kids don't know. In a jarring comic-horrific sequence, Alfredo goes after the default prey—a random, unlucky streetwalker—plucked from a familiar corner. Speeding off while the working gal screams bloody murder, the boys give new meaning to the phrase "fast food." But in a parody of sexual initiation, once they get her back to the house, they don't know what to do with her. Though she vividly describes what she'd be happy to do with them if they only let her free. Mom’s pissed, but also pragmatic. Whacking their victim in the skull, she quickly decides which side of the "pets or meat?" debate she's on.

We Are What We AreThe bleak, if irresistible, humor resonates with a gothic sitcom punch, and doesn't miss a shot at ironic existential touches, as when a religious crazy on a bus hands Alfredo a scrap of paper with the motto: "You are alive." But it's also purposefully offset with genuine coming-of-age flourishes and an eye for anatomizing the lower depths of Mexico City as surely as our protagonists indulge in grisly dismemberments. Obscuring the gore for the most part, Grau instead brings to (extremely low-level) light the human stain. As the clocks tick-tock in a maddening chorus, cops circling the cannibal compound before one of the most ill-advised house calls since The Human Centipede, Alfredo bolts off on an adventure—stalking a cluster of pretty young men to a disco. The last third of We Are What We Are becomes a thrilling display, as Grau and his cinematographer Santiago Sanchez wind through alleys and perch voyeuristically, fluid motion nimbly tracking the action through penumbral locations that would have done Val Lewton proud.

We Are What We AreHere's a bit of a spoiler, but it's essential to give Grau credit for investing his characters with a sympathetic complexity. Alfredo's apparent struggle over zeroing in on his target may have more to do with revealing his sexuality than diet preferences. That frission rhymes nicely with the sleight-of-hand employed to keep us guessing about what all goes down in the cannibal lair, a candle-lit abattoir which is finally explored in the midst of a shoot-out.

Enough remains ambiguous that We Are What We Are practically compels a repeat viewing, as if stirring a pot of soup for an errant scrap of meat. Dare I say it? The movie makes you hungry for more.

[We Are What We Are opens in limited release today, from IFC Films.]

by Elvis Mitchell REVIEW: Appetites Go Awry in Nifty, Nasty Horror Import We Are What We Are

2011-02-21T16:27:00.001-06:00

You might want to catch We Are What We Are before its inevitable, much-too-glossy remake brightens the walls of American multiplexes. I saw it last fall at the 2010 Fantastic Fest in Austin, where writer/director Jorge Michel Grau’s deft confidence at rendering his tale of family dynamics gone horribly awry in Mexico City got his film a jury prize.

Grau understands that his tale has so much going for it that he didn’t need to elevate the stakes by hosing it down with meaningless visual flair. If sometimes it feels overly controlled, so be it; what Grau does is like having someone whisper an urban legend half-stolen from a news story after way too many tequila shots just before dawn. The very woozy nature of the story itself works — it doesn’t demand a shout. The result is as impressive a filmmaking debut as I’ve seen in some time: a 1970s Wes Craven film - the era of the original The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left — as directed by Claire Denis.

A grizzled, dirty old man drops dead while staring at mannequins in the window of a mall store; blood erupts from his mouth before he does. And his family — a dour mother, two sons (one volatile and the other with red-rimmed sympathetic eyes) and a daughter looking for someone to emerge as leader — is left to fend for itself. Grau takes his time dropping details, and gets superb support from his cinematographer, who frames the shots as catching life for a documentary in “We Are…”

I’m trying to not to give too much away; I had the advantage of catching the film at a horror/fantasy film festival where I had the benefit of being surprised. The set up is this: A skeevy coroner who takes way too much pleasure in his work says — after working on the father’s corpse — “It’s shocking how many people eat each other in this city,” the line both is and isn’t a metaphor.

Grau seems to have been inspired by horror comics as much as the grim fairy tale theme employed by Guillermo del Toro. And cannibalism as brutal allegory as George Romero supplied in Night of the Living Dead. Unfortunately, the ending isn’t much of a surprise, unless you’ve never seen a horror movie before. But the way he uses anger as a family trait to dramatize the family’s battle to survive is fascinating; it’s both congenital and driven by circumstance. Everyone is competitive; even the lowlife cops hustling to investigate (which Grau handles with hilarious, low-key cool; it’s his relief pitch) all are finally done in by their appetites.

Grau’s talent is for shutting out the Red Bull overstimulation of current horror movies and concentrating on what matters in We Are What We Are. (That’s even though the movie brings to mind a line from the Ke$ha song with a similar title: “Hot and dangerous, if you’re one of us…”) When someone — Michael Bay, let’s say — gets his hands on it to remake it, it probably will be called “We R Who We R.” That’s when the real horror will start — unfortunately; and you’ll probably be able to tan yourself from the light bouncing off the cast’s teeth.

Kobe Bryant is, "The Black Mamba". Directed by Robert Rodriguez.

2011-02-21T12:04:00.000-06:00

We Are What We Are by Keith Phipps

2011-02-21T10:39:00.001-06:00

February 17, 2011

Things are tough all over in the Mexico City of We Are What We Are, the striking debut feature from Jorge Michel Grau. Well, not all over. The shoppers at the upscale mall in the film’s opening must be doing well enough to insulate themselves from the rough economy and the degradations familiar to those it batters. They look on in disgust when a lurching, rag-clad man collapses and dies while gesturing at a mannequin behind a shop window as if it were the last unattainable object of desire in a life filled with them. He doesn’t get much of a chance to trouble the shoppers with his passing, however. A cleaning crew unceremoniously sweeps his corpse away before it even has a chance to cool.

His death affects others much more profoundly, however. He leaves behind a shrill wife (Carmen Beato) and three teenage children: a hot-tempered, violence-prone son (Alan Chávez), his more sensitive brother (Francisco Barreiro), and their pragmatic sister (Paulina Gaitán). They’re unsure how they’ll scrape together a living with their modest income repairing watches at a market. And they’re desperate to solve another problem: how to keep “the ritual” going, and where to find the human flesh they need to consume as part of it.

Mixing social commentary and black humor with copious amounts of blood and cracking bones, We Are What We Are offers a cannibal’s-eye view of Mexico City’s seamier side, as the three teens try to figure out the best way to keep the flesh coming in without attracting too much attention. Street kids prove too slippery, Beato deems prostitutes too unclean, and cruising gay clubs causes Barreiro to ask some new questions about his own identity.

No one, however, questions the need to eat human flesh. Though We Are What We Are offers no details about the ritual, it suggests an ancient practice that’s kept a subterranean existence into the 21st century, one that might even fit better into the 21st century than in the recent past. Grau uses cool colors and an understated style to offset the violence and the grime, but after the opening scene at the mall, the film seldom visits another location that even approaches sanitary. A subplot involving cops perpetually on the verge of discovering the flesh-eaters slows down the film’s momentum, but also offers a chance for a key line, which a cop tosses off nonchalantly after seeing a finger pulled from a human stomach: “So many people eat others in this city.”

Grau effectively mixes wry, bloody, deadpan gags, family drama, and stomach-churning violence. One moment, Barreiro, Gaitán, and Chávez try to sort out their new family dynamic; the next, they’re trying to deal with a shovel-battered corpse that may or may not be of high enough quality to eat. It’s just another day in one of the world’s dark places, one avoided by those who can afford to stay away, but drawing closer every day.

There's Something Special in the Salsa of We Are What We Are Explore the family dynamic of Mexico City's hardest workin' cannibals. By Jordan Hoffman

2011-02-21T00:18:00.000-06:00

A man crawls outside a shopping center, vomits black liquid and drops dead. As passers-by ignore him, a janitorial staff quickly erases any trace of the incident. It is the striking opening to the very unique and very hard-to-pin-down film We Are What We Are.

One could, I suppose, pitch this as a story about a family of cannibals living in a current, urban setting, but the film's writer/director Jorge Michel Grau is enough of a trickster to keep you guessing about the film's true intent.

Our dead friend is the principle breadwinner - a clock and watch repairman, if you can handle the symbolism - for two sons, a daughter and a wife living in the junkyard outskirts of Mexico City. With Dad gone, someone has to step up and bring back material for "the Ritual."

It is implied that our family will die unless they feast upon flesh, but nothing supernatural is ever shown. . . and the behavior of the family is so different from what we expect in supernatural horror pics that I'm firmly of the belief that this isn't a group of hellish demons. They're just nuts.

The power dynamic fluctuates between the four survivors - a stern Mother, a Lady MacBeth-ish Sister, an unsure, gay (maybe?) older brother and a hothead younger brother. At issue is who should be getting the next meal, and who should be the next meal. Mom has a real bug up her ass about the easiest and most obvious target: prostitutes. It seems that Dad wouldn't just kidnap, kill and eat them, he had a habit of having sex with them, too, and that transgression has made a big mark on family policy.

A secondary story of two cops on the trail of the family (and not all that fazed by what they're doing) offers an intriguing look at crime and punishment in a hopeless city.

Most of We Are What We Are is shot at night, in ugly locations that had me hoping there was plenty of Purel on set. While there are moments of gore it is not primarily an action picture. What's key is that it achieves what nearly every low budget genre film wants: the thrills to engage the senses with enough intellect and insight to engage the mind.

Spiritualized - Come Together

2011-02-20T13:38:00.000-06:00

PJ Harvey Sheela

2011-02-20T13:34:00.000-06:00

John & Jehn - Time for the devil

2011-02-20T12:52:00.000-06:00

We Are What We Are (Somos lo que hay) by Ron Wilkinson Feb 15, 2011

2011-02-20T11:55:00.001-06:00

When the patriarch of the family passes away, the teenage children must take responsibility for the family chores: the preparation of the rituals, the hunting and putting the all-important meat on the table. These newfound responsibilities are even more daunting, ...more

Dad dies in a poverty-stricken family and the young cannibals have to put food on the table. What are the kids to do?

This corker of a horror film is so understated that it takes the first half of the film for the viewer to simply figure out it is horrible. Paulina Gaitán plays sister Sabina and Francisco Barreiro plays Alfredo and Alan Chavez plays Julian, the brothers of the deceased father.

Sabina is worldly well beyond her years. She enters the film after a long night on the streets at an undisclosed location. Her mother is furious but the daughter says nothing. This has happened before and the stage is set for things to get worse.

Indecisive Alfredo is a closeted homosexual, sadistic Julian and domineering sister Sabina burn with suppressed incestuous longing. The sudden death of its patriarch leaves a Mexican clan bereft, panicked about their survival and fumbling to continue a family tradition—namely, a cannibalistic rite that involves the hunting and gathering of fresh human meat in present-day Mexico City.

The children are casting off the mother in the wake of their father’s death. Mom has been keeping the poverty-stricken family together with her brand of tough love.

When this tough love becomes the rules surrounding the consumption of human bodies, the film turns very strange, very fast. There is a downward spiral into the most realistic horror that has been shown on the silver screen this year.

Julian is young and twitchy. He is prone to outbursts of violence against anybody who questions the family. His older brother Alfredo is supposed to take over the family after the father’s death but his mother will not let him do it.

He is cowed and unable to find a sense of direction. Normally this would be heartrending. But when the indecision happens in the context of kidnapping, murdering and eating people from the streets, the kid may be justified.

You get the picture about this film. Something very different. In a cruel twist of fate young actor Alan Chavez, who also plays Barreiro's younger brother in “Somos Lo Que Hay,” was gunned down by police in Mexico City in September. He was only nineteen.

Enter the pair of crooked cops whose desire to catch the deviants dining on local prostitutes ranks right up there with getting fresh doughnuts. The two inject their own particular brand of black humor into the situation. They are so concerned about getting bribes out of the situation that they don’t even consider the emotional consequences of living on other’s bodies.

The picture dares the viewer to decide who is the crazier, the cannibals or the cops.

As the boys are forced to go out a get people they become involved in the darkest and most incredibly profane acts of violence on the streets. The older brother begins to act out his latent homosexual leanings by kidnapping a gay man to eat but the operation is foiled by strange circumstances.

Street prostitutes become a target of choice but the mother is furious when she finds out the moral bankruptcy of her next meal. Sister Sabina seems to want to have sex with her brothers but she is held back by a life outside the house that is never revealed to the audience.

This is one of the first feature flicks of young director Jorge Michel Grau and is a fantastic start to a great career. It combines slow-burning suspense with an undercurrent of simply bizarre lifestyles taken from the streets of Mexico City. The movie marks a whole new approach to horror. Cinema verite of the unbelievable. You wish it were fiction but it is too weird to be anything but the truth.

Visit the movie database for more information.

Written and Directed by: Jorge Michel Grau
Starring: Francisco Barreiro, Alan Chávez and Paulina Gaitan
2010 New York Film Festival, screened September 30, 2010
MPAA: Not Rated
Runtime: 99 minutes
Country: Mexico
Language: Spanish with English subtitles
Color: Color

Interview: Jorge Michel Grau Talks ‘We Are What We Are’

2011-02-20T01:07:00.001-06:00

The New York Film Festival generally isn’t known for featuring horror films, but they made an exception in 2010 with Jorge Michel Grau‘s “We Are What We Are.” Though the film was billed as “the Mexican cannibal movie,” first-time feature director Grau goes far beyond genre conventions to craft a story that paints a haunting—and quite unflattering—picture of his home country. When the patriarch of a cannibalistic family dies, his son is forced to take up his father’s murderous mantel, revealing fractures in both family dynamics and in the Mexican social structure. During the festival, we sat down with Grau to discuss his film, which we raved about back in October. “We Are What We Are” opens in select theaters tomorrow and is available On Demand on February 23.

The Playlist: How does your film reflect contemporary Mexico?
Jorge Michel Grau: What the aspect of the film reflects of the city as being most accurate is that sense of everybody is on their own, you know, you’ve got to save yourself, sink-or-swim kind of situation. What the film wanted to reflect through the creation of these sort of tribal family structures is the sense that in Mexico unless you belong to a tribe, whether you call that tribe a family or your part of a group of prostitutes or you belong to a group of street children, or you’re part of a police force, unless you belong to one of these tribes, you’re really on your own. And so these tribal structures almost allow people to sort of survive, but at the same time, they survive by preying on other tribes, so this is I guess the gist of what the story wanted to convey is the sense that in a country where there’s about forty to fifty murders on a daily basis that unless you belong to one of these tribal structures that will protect you, it’d be a very dangerous situation. But also then, this process of survival by preying, each tribe preying on the other ones.

Is it very specific to Mexico City?
Violence is pretty spread out throughout the country. You notice it throughout the country, but it’s violent in Mexico City as well. What we have in Mexico City is something like a kidnapping industry where the kidnappers, we found out, tend to be police officers, so there’s a sense among the general population of lack of protection, and this sort of sense of violence that permeates the city is something that the film…and so the disintegration of the family structure that’s depicted in the film is in a certain way a metaphor for the larger disintegration of the social fabric where people don’t really know each other any more.

Due to the subject matter, it’s very easy to throw the “horror” label onto it, but there’s much more there. It’s more like a drama in some ways. How did you first come up with the idea? Did it start off as a cannibal movie or…?
If I could label it myself, I would rather think of it as a drama, but surely I was working within the framework of a horror genre, and in a way, I used this framework of a horror genre, so the story wouldn’t just sort of spill over, spill out, get lost. I’ve always been interested in horror, and in certain ways, this is a horror film.

What horror directors do you like?
Guillermo del Toro. There’s actually an entire sequence in the film that pays homage to del Toro’s first film, “Cronos.” I don’t know if Takashi Miike is thought of as a horror director, but I like his work very much. I like this kind of horror where you never see the monsters, a kind of invisible type of horrors, like the kind you see in “The Blair Witch Project.” And “[REC],” a Spanish film. I’m also very drawn to this sort of direct, straightforward, violent filmmaking along the lines of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, or the kind of violence you see in Michael Haneke’s films. [Mathieu] Kassovitz’s “La Haine.”

Your film is not very bloody, at least not with how bloody it could have been. Was that an intentional choice to kind of rein it in?
I felt that the audience really had to be involved with the film, engaged with the film, in order for us to convey the sense of reality. That maybe that the audience would find this story of cannibalism too far out and they wouldn’t connect with the film. And so what I decided to do when it came to filming those scenes of violence is to initiate the violence on screen, but finish it off screen so that through the use of sound, I would leave it up to the audiences to imagine what had happened, so to whatever extent they wanted to pursue in their own mind whatever happened, they were free to do so. In that sense I guess the two most important scenes in the film: the death of the police officer that happens literally behind a wall, and the other one is the death of one of the principal characters in the film that happens completely off screen, and that sort of leaves it up to the viewer to imagine what happened.

Can you talk about working with your director of photography [Santiago Sanchez]? It’s a really well-shot film.
It’s also that person’s first film. The program that financed the film—which is a program that gives money to first-time directors…clauses indicate that both the director, the cameraman, and the producer, it has to be their first time making a movie, for all three of them. In my approach, discussion with Santiago, the cameraman, director of photography, we talked about two ideas: one, that I wanted to create a climate of claustrophobia so that the characters would feel trapped. The viewer would get a sense that the characters were trapped, not only trapped in the space, but even trapped inside of themselves. They couldn’t really escape who they were. And also that I really wanted low levels of lighting. Not necessarily that the film be dark, but that the lighting would be low enough that the audience would have to make an effort to see what was going on. So I sat down with him, and we did sort of a mock-up of how the shooting would go, and he had a lot of participation in it. In fact he was the one who decided that the film would be shot in widescreen, in the 2:35 ratio. It originally would pose a problem because it meant that we were going to have to spend more money, that it was going to be costlier for us to shoot it that way. But we were able to obtain sponsorship from a company in Mexico that sells Panavision equipment and they actually gave us a discount of up to 85% on the equipment, so Santiago was able to get all the equipment that he wanted or needed, and the whole film was shot with just four lights on the set. Personally, I think he did a phenomenal job. I gave him complete freedom to do whatever he wanted to do with the lighting. I feel that he wanted to sort of develop the nature of the characters through lighting, and in that sense, I feel that he did a very good job, and I would just arrive and he would have everything set up and we would just follow through with basically whatever he had decided.

What did you learn from making your first feature film?
I love making movies. I don’t see myself doing anything else. There are things that I still feel I need to fix. Now when I see the film, I always spot problems. Maybe I should’ve moved the camera a little bit further back, or further over here. What I really loved was working with the actors, developing their performances. We actually got together, the four principal actors and myself, and we sort of lived together in a room about this size for a long time as we were sort of trying to develop the atmosphere of the film and when we emerged from this situation on the first day of shooting. So this was perhaps was I learned the most and loved the most was this working with the actors.

How did you find the actors?
The first problem that I found was that many actors rejected the script. One of the actresses had a manager who constantly told her to turn down the film. I just wanted to add that before when we were talking about the job he did with the actors, he said he took them to the morgues and he took them to see autopsies, things like that, to get them prepared for the experience of doing the work. One of the actresses, her manager told her to turn the part. My only rule was to find actors that looked the age. Francisco Barreiro, who’s the main actor, who plays Alfredo, and his sister Paulina [Gaitán], and Paulina introduced me to the other actor, who sadly just passed away, Allen Chavez. And then I worked with those three actors at first, and then I passed the screenplay on to Carmen Beato, who is a very well-known actress in Mexico. And she accepted to do the film as long as it wasn’t very bloody. When it actually came to shooting the scenes she was in, she actually would ask me to put more blood on her. I think the secret was that they fell in love with the project and I think you can actually see that on the screen, the feeling that they have for it.

What are you working on now…and next?
I have two projects: one that is already fairly advanced and it is one that is quite similar to “We Are What We Are.” The other project is an adaptation of a novel I’ve been given the rights to the novel by its author, a young novelist called Roguelio Guedea. It’s a novel about a serial killer, the only serial killer in the state of Colima in Mexico. And, of course, a major issue is obtaining finance for the film. In Cannes, I was approached by a couple of producers, investors who interested in the next project after seeing the film. I had contact with a couple of American producers, but we’ll see.

Exclusive: Jorge Michel Grau on We Are What We Are Source: Edward Douglas

2011-02-19T16:22:00.001-06:00

February 17, 2011

Cannibalism is a subject that lends itself well to horror films, though it's also something that actually happens in the real world despite all the moral taboos it breaks.

In Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are, cannibalism is a way of life for a Mexican family who find themselves without their head of household who normally brings home the unlucky souls the family feeds upon. Needing new sources of food and without their so-called hunter-gatherer, it's up to his two sons and their seemingly innocent daughter (played by Paulina Gaitan of Sin Nombre) to go out into the city to find new victims upon which they can feed.

Grau's gritty realism at depicting this particular region of Mexico and showing how one family survives within it makes the genre-mixing We Are What We Are more of a street drama than a straight horror flick, but the brutal dismemberment of the family's eventual food supply will likely make stomachs churn even in the most steadfast horror fans… and hopefully not from hunger!

After premiering at Cannes in 2010, Grau's film played at a number of Fall film festivals including Fantastic Fest in Austin (where it won their award for Best Picture!) and the New York Film Festival. ShockTillYouDrop.com had a chance to talk to Grau while he was in New York for the latter. You can also check out an exclusive clip from the film we scored right here.

ShockTillYouDrop.com: Let's start with an easy one: what got you going on writing a movie about a cannibal family in Mexico who have to eat people to survive?
Jorge Michel Grau: My main objective was to tell the story of a family that's disintegrating as a metaphor for society that's disintegrating, and the theme of cannibalism I thought served me well. It's a very obvious metaphor that served me to talk about how man preys upon other me. Man's only predator is another man, and so I thought that the combination of these two themes really worked well for the purpose of what I wanted to do.

Shock: Did you see it as a horror film while you were making it? Or a human story with genre elements?
Grau: I like horror films. I saw a lot of films by John Carpenter and Dario Argento when I was younger, and I'm drawn to sort of dark twisted, gruesome films, so I was naturally drawn to that particular genre.

Shock: There isn't anything supernatural like ghosts or vampires, and it feels like this could be a real thing where people need to survive or find victims for occult rituals. There's nothing that takes it out of the ordinary human story, so I was curious whether this was something that has happened or happens in Mexico. I guess the question is how much of this is based in reality?
Grau: From a dramatic point of view, the film is very realistic and is based on a reality that you do see in daily life in Mexico, these problems, the disintegration of families, the decaying of the social fabric, widespread corruption among police offices. The existence of tribes or sectors of society that have been abandoned by the government or by the authorities. As I drifted towards the theme of cannibalism, I began to do research on the topic, and I found out that there'd actually been a number of cases in real life about people who had eaten other human beings. In Mexico, there were two famous cases, here in the U.S. there have several well-known cases, and the famous case in Austria where somebody made an online advertisement wanting to eat somebody, and they got an answer and they actually ate that person.

Shock: Wow, I remember that ad, but I never knew someone actually followed through on it. This family clearly doesn't have money, but they seem to be getting people to eat not necessarily to survive, but for some sort of cult ritual that requires eating the flesh. They could probably get food from other places, but you kept it rather vague why they needed specifically to eat humans. Was that intentional?
Grau: Yeah, I made that lack of information on purpose. Not only did I want the audience to be in the dark, so to speak, but I wanted the characters to a certain extent to be in the dark about their motivations. So for instance, in the case of the ritual, I wanted to create a situation whereby the characters feel the need to perform this ritual, but they don't really know why they have to do it or the reasons behind it. This allows the main character Alfredo to undergo the personal crisis that he undergoes, because he doesn't understand what's behind the process and the need to carry out what has to be carried out.

Shock: You have an amazing cast for this. Paulina Gaitan I know was in "Sin Nombre," but how important was it to get new faces or actors who might not be as well-known compared to getting better known Mexican actors?
Grau: My only basic rule was to find actors that had the age or looked like the age of the character. There are very few actors that are 17 or 18 in Mexico who are very well known. Paulina is perhaps the only one, but the truth is that when we began to shoot "We Are What We Are," "Sin Nombre" had just opened commercially (in Mexico) so of course, she's much better known now but that was not the case when we began making our movie. The actress who plays the mother, Carmen Beato, she's very well known for her television roles, less so for her film roles, but I really liked her as an actress and that's why I went after her.

Shock: As a fan of Argento and Carpenter, when you actually had to show the mother dismembering the body, how gory did you want to go with it? Did you know you wanted to go to a certain point and be very realistic with it?
Grau: As I was writing the script, I came up with certain scenes and I shot the scenes that I had written in terms of violence and what I did was I basically put myself in the shoes of the spectators and thought, "What would I want to see? In what part of the film did I want to see the violence occur and what level of violence as a viewer was I willing to accept?" I feel that by allowing each viewer to imagine the degree of violence that he or she would allow their mind to run away with, it will be a much more effective film, so that's why there are scenes of violence that are initiated and then at a certain point, the violence is shifted from on-screen to off-screen. Things happen behind a wall, behind plastic or curtains so you don't actually see what happens.

Shock: But the sound FX when they're dismembering the body is amazing because it's very disturbing without actually seeing everything. By the way, I'm surprised the family didn't find any tourists for their cannibalistic ritual, because I would think they would make much easier victims and a good source for food. Do they not like the taste of tourists in Mexico?
Grau: Well, because the film takes place in a neighborhood that's actually far away from the tourist centers of Mexico. It would be very unlikely that a tourist would ever find his or her way into this particular part of the city, so hence, the reason why… as an exercise, it crossed my mind at one point, but because I really wanted to make a very hyper-realistic film, it would be very difficult for a tourist to find his or her way into this neighborhood or for me to go and grab one and bring them in. I also didn't want the characters of the film to actually stray far from their natural habitat, which would be this particular part of the city.

Shock: I don't want to give up the ending and who survives, who doesn't, but you definitely seemed to set up the possibilities for a sequel. Was that very deliberate to explore this material in another film or was that just a tease for the audience?
Grau: Well, on the one hand I wanted to put an ending that would put the viewer in the position of saying "Great, the monster survived!" but at the time say, "Oh my God! The monster survive, I'm at risk!" So there would be that ambivalence, but of course, yes, it does open the possibility for a sequel. Since making a film is such a difficult proposition in Mexico, who knows if that possibility will ever come about? If it does, yes, maybe I'll follow through with it, and if not, I'll just go ahead with something else.

We Are What We Are opens in New York at the IFC Center on Friday, February 18, then On Demand on February 23.

Mexicannibals! by Henry Stewart

2011-02-18T19:59:00.001-06:00

We Are What We Are
Directed by Jorge Michel Grau

We Are What We Are, a gory and somber horror movie, reargrounds its genre and advances its characters to the fore. In general, a laudable approach: forming an affinity for the victims—or even, as here, the killers—is what makes the merely grisly truly frightening. Scary movies depend on sympathy. But as sci-fi slog Monsters demonstrated last year, this strategy comes at a risk--what if the characters aren't sympathetic? What if they're not as compelling as the sensational backdrop?

That's the problem with this Mexican import, which concerns a family that just lost its patriarch and sole provider—of human flesh! He put the food on the table for this pack of Mexicannibals: a critical, controlling and castrating mother and three adolescent children. The movie looks like a (South of) Texas Chainsaw Massacre prequel, but its themes are less macabre: it's more like French family drama A Christmas Tale with interludes of feral violence. The drama, though, is lame: the ogreish mother provokes a lot of teenage brooding, as her kids awkwardly come-of-age under duress. (This may involve coping with closeted homosexuality, but maybe not.) The cannibalism gives texture to the generic depiction of strained family dynamics amid Latin-American destitution. The cannibalism is a gimmick.

Although, some political dimensions do emerge. Is the man-eating family a reactionary symbol of the poor, "feeding" off of society? Or does it serve a progressive parable about how systemic indigence threatens us all? Is its focus on "ritual" a critique of Catholicism? Is human flesh a metaphor for illicit drugs, the violence of cannibalism a stand-in for the carnage of cartel clashes? The (mostly corrupt) cops close-in on our cannibal clan, hurting their organization (with the help of a peoples united) but not dismantling it. The scariest part of We Are What We Are might be the ultimate powerlessness of law and citizenry to quell the chaos in the Mexican slums.

JORGE MICHEL GRAU, “WE ARE WHAT WE ARE” By Brandon Harris on Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

2011-02-18T18:05:00.000-06:00

In We Are What We Are, first time Mexican helmer Jorge Michel Grau creates a deeply unsettling portrait of contemporary Mexican urban life which steady grows into many things all at once: a sincere family drama, an earnest exploration of the moral implications of cannibalism and a ribald satire of the seemingly intractable political and economic corruption that is haunting present day Mexico. All moody nighttime vistas and grim, claustrophobic interiors, Grau’s film manages both social commentary and grisly, bone-chilling terror the old-fashioned way, but it still manages to have a depth of human feeling that isn’t the stock and trade of this type of genre fare.

A graduate of Mexico’s state-operated Centro de Capacitacion Cinematographica, Grau worked as a producer and production manager on Mexican features, documentaries and education programs for television before his directorial breakthrough. We Are What We Are bowed at last year Director’s Fortnight in Cannes before premiering stateside at last fall’s New York Film Festival. It opens domestically from IFC this friday.

“We Are What We Are” director Jorge Michel Grau

Filmmaker: Your film builds very gradually, with a sort of slow burn rhythm that is popular on the festival circuit, but still somewhat unusual for the horror genre. How would you describe your approach to and inspirations from the universe of horror films?

Grau: I grew up watching horror films. What I wanted to deal with in this film was the disintegration of a family within a framework borrowed from the horror genres, but actually this is the experience of living in Mexico City. You can be living inside your home and outside of you; you’re surrounded by a situation that’s pretty much like that of a horror film. There are quite a number of cinematic references within the film to the genre of horror films or a cinema of violence,because that’s what I’m interested in. One of the obvious references in the film is to Guillermo Del Toro’s first film Cronos. That’s my approach to horror films, that’s the why I choose to shoot the film the way I did.

Filmmaker: Your depiction of corruption on all levels and within seemingly every institution of Mexico City life is quite striking. From the family to the police to the streets, no one seems to be untouched by a sense of collapse, by a loss of civic mindedness and social integrity.

Grau: What I want to talk about by looking at the disintegration of the family structure is to also talk about how tribal structures have become a form of survival for people in Mexico. Whether you belong to the police force or a tribe of prostitutes or the tribe of the family, it’s sort of a necessary way to get by in Mexico City. In that same process, I wanted to observe how that same process leads to those same tribes preying on each other in order to make it, in order to survive.

Mexico is on the verge of an abyss. Authority has eroded, we have this very brutal drug war, and people have a sense of the country drifting because of the violence and lack of control. That’s one thing people get out of the film, that there’s a social commentary aspect to it. You get the sense that the police force is preying upon the rest of society, but even within that tribe of the police force, the members are preying upon one another within it. That part of what I wanted to convey about what’s happening in Mexican society today.

Filmmaker: The film is at once a deadly serious film about cannibalism, which you play straight, never for easy laughs, and yet it has these wonderfully conceived parodic elements concerning the larger societal malaise in Mexico. Was that a hard balance to find in both the writing and the directing of the picture?

Grau: I wanted to underline the realism of the film so that when viewers would watch the film they’d say, “those are cannibals,” but also “this is a family trying to survive.” I wanted the story of cannibalism to be very serious and dramatic so that people would say, “Well, that’s the way it is.” That part of the story was so serious that I wanted to give it breathing space to the viewer by coming up with some of these comical situations, whether it’s the situation in the morgue or the relationship of the police officers. In Mexico we have a habit of making fun out of tragedy, so that at first people are suffering but then two weeks later there are 200 jokes about whatever tragic situation occurred. I devised in it a way so that the Mexican audience could identify; this sort of cultural identity of Mexicans would be reflected in the film. As the story is told, I wanted to them to encounter very serious situations and follow that with something that would make them laugh and then really hit them with something very strong so that they would suddenly feel a complete void following those drastic shifts.

Filmmaker: What’s the financing situation for a film like this? Are Mexican cannibalism movies a hard sale?

Grau: This film was made thanks to a program in the film school that helps first-time filmmakers make a film. There’s a prize of $700,000. I decided to participate in the contest because I was sure no one else would give me the money to make this film. The conditions for earning the prize was that neither the producer, director or cameraman would have previously worked on a feature film and the director of the film was not to earn any money, get a salary, get paid. That’s how this film was made. The film belongs the the film school.

Filmmaker: How did go about casting this family? They are both terrifying, monsters really, but also completely plausible as a struggling, working class Mexican family.

Grau: The only rule I set upon myself was to find actors who were about the age of the characters. The first actor I found was Francisco Barreiro, the protagonist of the film. I did some casting with Francisco present. I wasn’t so much interested in the look of the actors as I was the dynamic that was created by their interaction. Paulina Gaitan showed up for one of the castings and through Paulina I met the late Alan Chavez, who recently died after finishing the film. The three of them became very good friends. They had superb chemistry. That helped me enormously in working with them. Once I had the three kids, I went to look for an actress to play the mother and many actresses rejected the project, but I was lucky enough to find Carmen Beato and she fell in love with the project.

Once I had the actors, I sent them to morgues to see autopsies, to learn how instruments are used to break people’s bones. Then a week before shooting began, we locked ourselves away in room about the size of this one to generate that feeling of claustrophobia.

Filmmaker: Did you keep them there the whole week?

Grau: Yes, I was with them for an entire week.

Filmmaker: What did you do with them?

Grau: I wanted to generate a bond with them and among them, but I also wanted them to feel completely isolated from the rest of the world. By living together in a space where they had to eat together, go to the bathroom together, it can generate with the utter lack of privacy, a certain friction and hatred among them, so that then they could be able to live the experience of the characters, who love each other intensely but greatly desire to escape one another and remove themselves from the family structure.

Filmmaker: Was that difficult for them?

Grau: Yes is it was difficult for them. They got along very well at the beginning. That’s when they were only seeing each other at rehearsals. Once they started living together, tensions began to emerge. They realized that they didn’t actually like each other as much as they had originally thought. That’s what I wanted. To get that sense of hatred and dislike for each other out of each of them as the characters.

Filmmaker: What were the circumstances of Alan’s death?

Grau: He was killed by the police.

Filmmaker: Wow. That’s terrible.

Grau: [It happened] about two months after we completed shooting. His identity in real life was similar to that of the character in the film — he was abandoned by his mother, he had no father, he had no education beyond high school and had been living alone since age sixteen. He had been making money as an actor, but he was living out of control. He surrounded himself with people who were not good for his well being. He had this altercation with the police and was killed.

Filmmaker: Did he get a chance to see the film before he died?

Grau: He was an actor with enormous potential. In his short life he made nine movies and in that short time was twice nominated for Mexico’s equivalent to the Oscars. He was a revelation as an actor. I enjoyed enormously working with him. I sensed his potential, but I also sensed that his life was out of control. I tried to help him get his life together, I had the sense that his life was out of control and I wanted to put him to work on my next movie. I didn’t manage to help him in the end. He turned eighteen during production.

Filmmaker: Do you plan to revisit the horror genre?

Grau: Given the chance, I’d happy to make another horror film. Representation of violence fascinates me and the horror film is a site in which one can explore that.

Official Trailer Debut - We Are What We Are

2011-02-18T16:56:00.001-06:00

To go along with yesterday's incredible one-sheet debut, the official trailer for IFC Midnight's We Are What We Are, or Somos Lo Que Hay has slipped online and into our clutches. Dig it!

We Are What We Are (review here) will receive its US theatrical premiere on Friday, February 18th, at IFC Center in New York City. It will simultaneously be available nationwide on IFC Midnight’s video on demand platform, available to over 50 million homes in all major markets.

Synopsis
When a middle-aged man drops dead in a Mexico City shopping mall, leaving his widow and three teenage children destitute, the devastated family is confronted not only with his loss but with a terrible challenge — how to survive. The big issue at hand is that they have always existed on a diet of human flesh, consumed in bloody ritual ceremonies, and the victims have always been provided by the father. Now that he is gone, they must determine who will do the hunting. With a superb sense of aesthetics, slow-burning suspense and a dark wit, Mexican writer-director Jorge Michel Grau has created an arthouse horror treat.

Check out the trailer below courtesy of Spike TV!

“WE ARE WHAT WE ARE” (Film Review) by Samuel Zimmerman

2011-02-18T14:59:00.000-06:00

The best horror is often transcendent, using the grim and fantastic to discuss harsh real-world concerns. When such is the case with international fare, it can be a stimulating and exciting experience learning which fears the globe shares, and what horrors are all our own. Jorge Michel Grau’s cannibalism drama WE ARE WHAT WE ARE takes on such an aesthetic and not only comes to the U.S. as a damn good film, but a particularly resonant one.

The film (opening in New York City today and available on demand February 23 from IFC Films) sees a poverty-stricken family of cannibals lose their way of life when their patriarch is struck dead, and the questions of who will lead, who will provide and whether they can ultimately carry on are raised. From its opening, Grau establishes a quiet, unsettling atmosphere. His camerawork is subtle, but stylish and immediate, without flash or shake. The family’s conditions are awash in squalor and one gets a sense that, aside from talk of necessary ritual, if they didn’t consume human flesh, they wouldn’t exactly have the means to eat regularly.

As the crisis unfurls, the family descends into what could be considered common behavior for loved ones in dismay. Old tensions arise, the two sons, Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro) and Julián (Alan Chávez) argue fiercely, their mother Patricia (Carmen Beato) shuts down and sister/daughter Sabina (SIN NOMBRE’s Paulina Gaitan) is forced to mediate and take on authority. When the young, unprepared and unsure Alfredo becomes convinced of his rightful succession, he journeys out to prove his manhood, believing he can procure their next meal while learning who he is and what doing what he must really means.

It’s relatable, a family on the edge, and despite what they are, the drama is powerful. As is the tension, as the film also follows a pair of detectives on the trail of a digested finger found in the father’s stomach. You ache to know if they’ll succeed and continue on or implode, and what’s more, if you’re OK with your empathy for them. WE ARE WHAT WE ARE is concerned with class division in Mexico, but as the consequences of a down-turned economy are sadly realized by so many American families as well, the penchant to cannibalize each other figuratively and do what we must as humans to survive (even to those in the same situation) has become a global burden.

While the four leads put in standout work, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE falters a bit in that despite how engrossing and well-done the present family drama is, we’re privy to very little of what lies beneath it. There’s a truly heartbreaking moment between Alfredo and Patricia amidst a scenario of stunning violence, and when Alfredo explodes under the pressure of the task at hand and the weight of his mother’s lifelong treatment of him, it speaks volumes. It’s just too bad there isn’t more time devoted to what those volumes consist of.

Nonetheless, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE is a standout debut for Grau. Gorgeously constructed and successful as both a surface-value horror story (the violence is often matter-of-fact, grimy and brutal) and a saddening look at the current plight of the lower class, it’s hopefully only the beginning of great output from a strong new talent.

See an interview with writer/director Grau in FANGORIA #301, on sale this month.

‘We Are What We Are’: They Are What They Eat By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS

2011-02-18T14:03:00.001-06:00

“We Are What We Are,” Jorge Michel Grau’s macabre fable of urban survival, follows the disintegration of a pod of people eaters when its diseased patriarch expires in a shopping mall.

Swiftly removed by a wordless cleanup crew, the man’s remains are found to contain a single undigested finger. “It’s shocking how many people eat each other in this city,” remarks a husky medical examiner. Back at cannibal central, the deceased’s nearest and dearest — a monstrous wife (Carmen Beato), ghoulish daughter (Paulina Gaitán) and two troubled sons (Francisco Barreiro and Alan Chávez, who was tragically killed in 2009) — bicker over who will now procure the family’s groceries.

Unfolding in an impoverished neighborhood in Mexico City, this disturbing debut paints social decay with bold, elegant strokes and dizzying camera angles. Visualizing a metropolis of shocking callousness, where authorities are indifferent and shoppers sidestep fallen bodies, Mr. Grau serves up subdivisions of outcasts — homeless urchins, streetwalkers, gay men — as nothing more than a selection of entrees.

This ghastly scenario of poor preying on poor is, like the film’s gray-green palette, profoundly depressing and entirely pitiless. At the same time, the family — frequently viewed through filmy glass or blood-spattered plastic — is sui generis, its dietary preferences repeatedly referred to as a ritual whose origins remain unexplained. Were it not for the momentum created by a pair of venal cops and a posse of vengeful prostitutes, the story would feel as congealed as its gore. Yet as Mr. Grau’s camera lingers on the soft palms and fleshy underarms of innocent commuters, damned if he doesn’t — just for a second — make you want to take a nip.

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Jorge Michel Grau; director of photography, Santiago Sánchez; edited by Rodrigo Ríos; music by Enrico Chapela; production design by Alejandro García; produced by Nicolás Celis; released by IFC Midnight. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Francisco Barreiro (Alfredo), Alan Chávez (Julián), Paulina Gaitán (Sabina), Carmen Beato (Patricia), Jorge Zárate (Owen) and Esteban Soberánes (Octavio).

Joy Division - Transmission (Peel Sessions 1979)

2011-02-09T13:06:00.000-06:00

Godspeed you! black emperor - Static (Live in Athens Greece 18-12-2010)

2011-02-05T13:40:00.000-06:00

Ty Segall

2011-02-05T10:47:00.001-06:00

Abe Vigoda - "Bear Face" (Live at Amoeba)

2011-02-05T10:37:00.000-06:00

HEALTH :: DIE SLOW :: MUSIC VIDEO

2011-02-04T22:22:00.000-06:00

El Columpio Asesino / La marca en nuestra frente es la de Caín

2011-02-03T18:20:00.000-06:00

SONIC YOUTH live MOTE

2011-02-03T13:57:00.000-06:00

Suicide - Dream Baby Dream

2011-02-03T10:24:00.000-06:00

Japandroids - Young Hearts Spark Fire

2011-02-03T10:14:00.000-06:00

Autolux - Supertoys [aka. Let it be Broken] (From the Basement)

2011-02-03T10:05:00.000-06:00

THE BLOOD RED SHOES - IT'S GETTING BORING BY THE SEA LIVE

2011-02-01T13:55:00.000-06:00

Twin Shadow : Tyrant Destroyed @ Mishka

2011-02-01T12:09:00.000-06:00

The Dining Rooms - "Tunnel"

2011-01-24T18:01:00.000-06:00

PJ Harvey Sheela

2011-01-24T17:54:00.000-06:00

Los Punsetes - Accidentes

2011-01-24T17:48:00.000-06:00

Oh No Ono - On The Beach

2011-01-24T17:40:00.000-06:00

Colder - Wrong Baby

2011-01-24T17:07:00.000-06:00

Justice - Stress by Romain Gavras

2011-01-23T02:19:00.000-06:00

Sitges 2010: terror emergente en Latinoamérica

2011-01-19T19:06:00.000-06:00

Una de las líneas de la recién finalizada 43ª edición del Festival de Sitges fue mostrar ese cine de terror emergente que está naciendo en Latinoamérica. Que el cine de terror en esas latitudes goza de buena salud la tenemos en el cada vez más importante Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre y en Sitges se festejaba la suerte del festival argentino con el pase del documental Rojo Sangre, 10 años a puro género (2009, Elián Aguilar) que se estrenó en Argentina el 30 de noviembre del año pasado coincidiendo con el décimo aniversario del festival. El documental repasa las dificultades y compensaciones que supone realizar cine de género a través de los principales artífices argentinos.

Además del documental, el cine argentino se hizo presente en Sitges con la película Fase 7 dirigida por Nicolás Goldbart, una comedia apocalítica que toma como base la epidemia de gripe A y cuenta con la presencia del mítico Federico Luppi. Se la ha definido como un Rec pasado por el ácido humor bonaerense y a Serendipia se le quedó pendiente porque pese a ser un ente casi mitológico aún no ha desarrollado la capacidad de ser ubicua. Si tuvimos la inmensa suerte de poder ver las otras dos películas latinoamericanas, la uruguaya La Casa Muda (2010, Gustavo Hernández) y la mexicana Somos lo que hay (2010, Jorge Michel Grau).

Hemos ido siguiendo todo lo relacionado con La Casa Muda desde que estaba en fase de postproducción. En Febrero iniciábamos nuestra campaña de apoyo para que llegara a los cines, en abril anunciábamos su presentación en Cannes y celebrábamos más tarde que hubiera sido seleccionada en Sitges y hubiera vendido su distribución comercial en 16 países, finalmente el 8 de octubre teníamos el placer de verla en pantalla grande tal como deseamos que se exhibiera. Porque la película vale la pena y mucho empezaremos destacando lo más negativo de modo que se valoren aún más los aciertos. La película avanza sumergiéndonos en el terror que viven los personajes en un caserón abandonado, su largo plano secuencia nos provoca una sensación de inmediatez, sabemos lo mismo que sabe la protagonista y pasamos miedo con ella; se logra ese terror real en tiempo real que se había propuesto Gustavo Hernández en esta su ópera prima. La tensión y su crescendo nos mantienen pegados a la butaca y se crea entre la película y nosotros un acuerdo tácito: nos creemos la historia que nos cuenta y hasta nos sobresaltamos cuando la protagonista lo hace. Eso se mantiene así durante casi todo el metraje, hasta que de pronto nos sentimos traicionados en nuestra credulidad: un giro inesperado nos saca de la historia. Lo peor de La Casa Muda es que su final está dudosamente resuelto. ¿Por qué puede pasar eso? Hernández parte de hechos reales, un doble asesinato no resuelto en el que aparecieron dos cadáveres mutilados junto a una serie de fotografías, el suceso es enigmático y a un amante de las historias de miedo no puede por más que resultarle atractivo. Hernández se propuso narrarlo buscando una hipótesis que explicara el misterio y se exigió desafiar un reto: igualar el tiempo de proyección y el tiempo de acción para intensificar el terror. Esa exigencia funciona al modo de las contraintes que se imponen los oulipianos, las trabas, al contrario de lo que pueda parecer, enriquecen los relatos. Hernández quería contarnos la historia sin salir del mismo escenario de la acción, no hay flashbacks ni acciones paralelas, si seguimos comparando la película con la literatura obtenemos que el plano secuencia funciona al modo en que lo hace el narrador semiomnisciente, narrador que no anticipa sino que va mostrando lo que acontece en su misma sucesión temporal, y ahí viene el problema del final de La Casa Muda: no se han mostrado los elementos que pudieran darle sentido lógico al desenlace, al contrario, cae en el error de no mostrar si no decir, un decir que es puesto en boca de la protagonista justo en el momento en que se produce el giro. De ese modo el final se nos antoja sacado de la manga y eso es lo que empaña una película que hasta entonces había sido excelente. Excelente porque la planificación juega con el encuadre para hacer ir avanzando la trama, la cámara en ningún momento es subjetiva pero no se separa de la protagonista, una Florencia Colucci en estado de gracia, los fuera de campo actúan como intensificadores y los montajes internos permiten mostrar otros ángulos sin renunciar en ningún momento al punto de vista elegido; así consigue el objetivo que se propone: pasamos el mismo miedo que el personaje porque prácticamente estamos en sus mismas condiciones. Otro acierto es la banda sonora. La música de la película es casi un personaje más, con la peculiaridad de que es el único que sabe lo que está pasando, el único que posee toda la información y nos la va destilando de modo que aún nos hacemos más sujetos de la narración. Gracias a la banda sonora no somos meros espectadores sino parte integrante de la película la cual consigue de ese modo cumplir magistralmente la función catártica. Eso es lo que supieron ver los críticos que asistieron a su estreno en Cannes y que elogiaron la cinta uruguaya con afirmaciones como las siguientes: “El horror cobra un nuevo significado con el director uruguayo Gustavo Hernández en un impresionante debut… Al igual que los mejores ejemplos del género utiliza el suspenso por encima de la sangre para crear la tensión… Haber realizado todo esto en una sola toma es impresionante; haberlo hecho todo en una sola toma con una cámara digital es poco menos que milagroso” Lee Marshall SCREEN DAILY; “El film tiene un increíble sentido climático y juega bien con la oscuridad y los pequeños espacios.” Peter Sciretta SLASH FILM; “Fue un logro técnico y visual nunca antes alcanzado… Si eres fanático del horror o crees haber visto cinematografía increíble, sólo espera a ver esta película… Mírala cuanto antes!” Alex Billington FIRST SHOWING. Coincidimos con la opinión de estos críticos y al igual que ellos consideramos que la película nos muestra el talento de su joven director al que le deseamos la mejor de las suertes y de cuya carrera vamos a estar pendientes desde ya.

Más redonda resulta la película mexicana. Somos lo que hay nos cuenta la historia de una familia que sobrevive en México DF comiendo seres humanos a los que antes sacrifica a modo de ritual, la película arranca con la muerte del padre, a partir de ese momento el mayor de los hermanos habrá de esforzarse en ser el nuevo líder con una cierta oposición de su madre y su hermano; todo se complicará cuando la policía siga su rastro.

Se trata de una película compleja que podría definirse como drama de terror salpicado de descripción costumbrista más unas gotas de crítica social. Si alguna ciudad ejemplifica la sentencia de Hobbes, el hombre es un lobo para el hombre (homo homini lupus), esa es la capital mexicana, daba cuenta de ello Buñuel de modo realista en Los Olvidados (1950) y se hace eco ahora Jorge Michel Grau con está fábula, ácida y perturbadora, que es su primera película y cuyos protagonistas son una familia de desheredados que se comporta como una manada de depredadores aunque en verdad sean ellos las presas. Esta es una película de atmósferas que nos remite a su origen literario, un relato escrito por el propio director, se desarrolla como un cuento en el que los ogros fueran los protagonistas, los malos son los buenos; la propia madre se define a ella y a sus hijos como monstruos, palabras destinadas a no olvidar su realidad aberrante que en la batalla por la supervivencia ha degenerado en atrocidad y locura. La cinta, sin escatimar hemoglobina, huye del efectismo gore en su paseo por lo sórdido dando así tintes más realistas a la historia. Y es que no está contándonos únicamente una ficción, no sólo porque pueda estar inspirada en casos de canibalismo real en México como los de José Luis Calva Cepeda o Gumaro de Dios, sino porque Jorge Michel Grau está haciendo una radiografía de los males que aquejan a México y que tan bien retrató Octavio Paz en El Laberinto de la Soledad. México y su grito “Hijo de La Chingada” alusión a la Malinche (esa india que traicionó a Moctezuma, de la que son descendientes) en el que se expresa su orgullo de pueblo derrotado por el invasor, contradictoria afirmación de sí mismos y su peculiar idiosincrasia que muestra y a la vez esconde sus miserias. Será por ello que esta película, que llegó a La quincena de los realizadores de Cannes y ha sido recientemente premiada con el Silver Hugo Special Jury Prize del Festival Internacional de Chicago, ha tenido una dispar acogida en México. Algunos críticos, como Carlos Bonfil de La Jornada, arremeten contra ella por considerarla un drama tremendista que únicamente retrata lo disfuncional y ansían un cine que se haga eco de aspectos más amables de su país aunque lo reconozcan colapsado. Pero los cineastas responden a la crítica que esto es lo que hay, Somos lo que hay titula Jorge Michel Grau a su ópera prima de impecable factura porque así ve su realidad y así la plasma en su metáfora. Ahora bien, quedarse en que muestra sólo lo más sórdido es no ser capaz de ver la película en toda su profundidad, tiene mucho de burla contra la autoridad y contra la cultura de depredación que sufren los mexicanos, pero no deja de hacernos sentir su admiración por sus raíces, ese rico folklore capaz de embellecer hasta la misma muerte. Porque la familia protagonista no es una más en largo listado de familias de psicópatas que nos ha regalado el cine, no aman el asesinato son más bien supervivientes en un mundo que se les antoja apocalíptico y en el que para perpetuarse han ideado una ceremonia ritual en la que practicar la comunión con la carne. No viven su hacer como un asesinato sino como una ofrenda. No sólo está en juego su manutención, el ritual es el que les da sentido como familia, lo único que a su parecer podrá evitar su descomposición. De ahí que tras la muerte del padre haya una lucha por decidir quién ha de ser el nuevo líder, esa muerte saca a la luz las rivalidades y las alianzas; la película desciende hasta el mundo del incesto no consumado con esa hermana que hace de bisagra entre los dos hijos varones y los usa como escuderos para sentar su primacía frente la madre. Todo esto nos lo cuenta Grau con una preciosista planificación que juega con toda la profundidad de campo y el desenfocado parcial para transmitir la intensidad del drama en sus magistrales encuadres. A ello contribuye igualmente la oscura banda sonora y el esmerado diseño de sonido (el opresivo ruido de los relojes que aventura su clímax es sencillamente abrumador). Serendipia salió del cine Retiro con la certeza de que esta receta de cocina canibal propia de Topor iba a ser uno de los mejores platos que le iba a permitir degustar ese gran banquete que es el Festival de Sitges. Esperamos que esta breve crónica os haya despertado las ganas de catarla.

Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration

2011-01-18T17:20:00.001-06:00

by Ariston Anderson

Over the course of 45 years in the film business, Francis Ford Coppola has refined a singular code of ethics that govern his filmmaking. There are three rules: 1) Write and direct original screenplays, 2) make them with the most modern technology available, and 3) self-finance them. But Coppola didn’t develop this formula overnight. Though he found Hollywood success at the young age of 30, he admits that the early “Godfather” fame pulled him off course from his dream of writing and directing personal stories. Like Bergman, Coppola wanted to wake up and make movies based on his dreams and nightmares.

Thanks in no small part to his booming wine business, Coppola now does just that. He recently wrapped his latest picture, “Twixt Now and Sunrise,” based on an alcohol-induced dream he had in Turkey. The film even features the latest 3-D technology – but as a brief dramatic segment that serves the story, rather than the typical two-hour, multiplex gimmick.

I sat down with Mr. Coppola at La Mamounia, the legendary Moroccan palace-turned-hotel, during the Marrakech International Film Festival, where he shared insights on the filmmaking craft with local students. Rejecting the popular “master class” format, Coppola preferred a simple “conversation,” where he spoke candidly with students and shared his advice generously. What follows are excerpts from both conversations.

Why did you choose not to teach a master class?
For me in cinema there are few masters. I have met some masters – Kurosawa, Polanski – but I am a student.

I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, “I learned so much today,” that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It’s only 100 years old.

Even in the early days of the movies, they didn’t know how to make movies. They had an image and it moved and the audience loved it. You saw a train coming into the station, and just to see motion was beautiful.

The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do. But unfortunately, after 15-20 years, it became a commercial industry. People made money in the cinema, and then they began to say to the pioneers, “Don’t experiment. We want to make money. We don’t want to take chances.”

The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do.

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before? I always like to say that cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby. You have to take a risk.

You try to go to a producer today and say you want to make a film that hasn’t been made before; they will throw you out because they want the same film that works, that makes money. That tells me that although the cinema in the next 100 years is going to change a lot, it will slow down because they don’t want you to risk anymore. They don’t want you to take chances. So I feel like [I’m] part of the cinema as it was 100 years ago, when you didn't know how to make it. You have to discover how to make it.

conversation_550
Gene Hackman in The Conversation.

Do you feel like you’re more of a risk-taker now?
I was always a good adventurer. I was never afraid of risks. I always had a good philosophy about risks. The only risk is to waste your life, so that when you die, you say, “Oh, I wish I had done this.” I did everything I wanted to do, and I continue to.

What’s the most useful piece of advice you’d give a student?
The first thing you do when you take a piece of paper is always put the date on it, the month, the day, and where it is. Because every idea that you put on paper is useful to you. By putting the date on it as a habit, when you look for what you wrote down in your notes, you will be desperate to know that it happened in April in 1972 and it was in Paris and already it begins to be useful. One of the most important tools that a filmmaker has are his/her notes.

If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before?

Is it important to veer away from the masters to develop one’s own style?
I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep, he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.

And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.

How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?
We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money.

What’s the greatest challenge of a screenwriter?
A screenplay has to be like a haiku. It has to be very concise and very clear, minimal. When you go to make it as a film, you have the suggestions of the actors, which are going to be available to you, right? You’re going to listen to the actors because they have great ideas. You’re going to listen to the photographer because he will have a great idea.

You must never be the kind of director, I think maybe I was when I was 18, “No, no, no, I know best.” That’s not good. You can make the decision that you feel is best, but listen to everyone, because cinema is collaboration. I always like to say that collaboration is the sex of art because you take from everyone you’re working with.

What is the one thing to keep in mind when making a film?
When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.

The reason it’s important to have this is because most of the time what a director really does is make decisions. All day long: Do you want it to be long hair or short hair? Do you want a dress or pants? Do you want a beard or no beard? There are many times when you don’t know the answer. Knowing what the theme is always helps you.

I remember in “The Conversation,” they brought all these coats to me, and they said: Do you want him to look like a detective, Humphrey Bogart? Do you want him to look like a blah blah blah. I didn’t know, and said the theme is ‘privacy’ and chose the plastic coat you could see through. So knowing the theme helps you make a decision when you’re not sure which way to go.

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Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

What’s the secret to working with great actors?
I’m going to tell you the story of how I prepared the actors of “The Godfather.” Of course, we were all nervous about Marlon Brando. As theatre students in the ‘50s, we looked at him as the greatest. And there was going to be the first time when all the actors were going to meet. Of course, Al Pacino, Jimmy Caan, Bobby Duvall, Johnny Cazale – everyone just admired Marlon. He was the Godfather. I knew that, and I said, “I can use this.” Napoleon once said, “Use the weapons at hand,” and this is what a film director has to do everyday. So what I did is I arranged for the first meeting as an improvisation.

I said, “I want you to come and be hungry.” And they came to a restaurant that I had arranged, the back room of the restaurant, just a table that looked like a home. Marlon, I had sit at the head of the table, and to his right I put Al Pacino, and to his left I put Jimmy Caan. I put Bobby Duvall, and I put Johnny Cazale, and I had my sister Talia, who played Connie, serve the food.

They had a dinner improvisation together, and after awhile everyone is relating to Marlon as the father, and Jimmy Caan is trying to impress him with jokes, and Al Pacino is trying to impress him by being intense and quiet, and my sister was so frightened – she was serving the food. And after that dinner they were the characters. So one tip I give you is, with improvisations, they really stick if there’s something sensual connected with them, like food or eating or making something with their hands.

Napoleon once said, ‘Use the weapons at hand,’ and this is what a film director has to do everyday.

How do you adapt a novel into a script?
Well, usually it’s the novel that’s adapted. The novel, unfortunately, is not a good form to adapt to film because the question of the novel is it’s usually much, much, much too long with too many characters, too many parts. The short story is the natural narrative, linear narrative to become a film. Many, many short stories have become films.

With a novel, what I can recommend is when you first read the novel, put good notes in it the first time, right on the book, write down everything you feel, underline every sensation that you felt was strong. Those first notes are very valuable. Then, when you finish the book, you will see that some pages are filled with underlined notes and some are blank.

In theatre, there’s something called a prompt book. The prompt book is what the stage manager has, usually a loose-leaf book with all the lighting cues. I make a prompt book out of the novel. In other words, I break the novel, and I glue the pages in a loose-leaf, usually with the square cutout so I can see both sides.

I have that big book with the notes I took, and then I go and I put lots more observations and notes. Then I begin to go through that and summarize the part that I thought was useful. And quite naturally you’ll see that the parts fall away, or that you have too many characters, so you know that you have to eliminate some or combine some. Working on it this way, from the outside in, being more specific as to what you think… then when you finish that, you are qualified perhaps to try to write a draft based on that notebook.

In the case of “The Godfather” I did that, and although I had a screenplay, I never used it. I always used to take that big notebook around with me, and I made the movie from that notebook. In the case of “Apocalypse,” there was a script written by the great John Milius, but, I must say, what I really made the film from was the little green copy of Heart of Darkness that I had done all those lines in. Whenever I would do a scene, I would check that and see what can I give the movie from Conrad.

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Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve given to your children, inside and outside of the industry?
Always make your work be personal.

And, you never have to lie. If you lie, you will only trip yourself up. You will always get caught in a lie. It is very important for an artist not to lie, and most important is not to lie to yourself. There are some questions that are inappropriate to ask, and rather than lie, I will not answer them because it’s not a question I accept. So many times we are asked things in our work or in life that you want to lie, and all you have to do is say, “No, that is an improper question.”

So when you get into a habit of not lying when you are writing, directing, or making a film, that will carry your personal conviction into your work. And, in a society where you say you are very free but you’re not entirely free, you have to try. There is something we know that’s connected with beauty and truth. There is something ancient. We know that art is about beauty, and therefore it has to be about truth.

You now have all the resources to do your own production, writing, directing. What’s the biggest barrier to being an artist?
Self-confidence always. The artist always battles his own/her own feeling of inadequacy.

How do you overcome that?
I’ve learned an interesting thing. When I was young on a movie set, I would try to stage the scene and the actors would read it, and I said, “Well, you stand here and you sit there, and blah, blah, blah.” They would say, “Well, I don’t think I should sit there, I should stand there. And I don’t think this line is right.” And they would begin to challenge the text.

What I learned, which is a simple idea, is that if you hold out with your vision a little bit, it’s like a cake being put in the oven. The scene doesn’t work immediately, you have to bake it a little bit. It’s unfair, when you begin to create a shot, say, or a scene, that it’s going to immediately be like those beautiful scenes in the movies. It needs a little bit of time to mature. It’s like taking the cake out without letting it be in the oven for more than a minute. Like, oh no, it’s terrible. So you have to be patient, and then slowly everyone starts to see that the ideas are right, or make the corrections. You have to battle the lack of confidence by giving the scene the chance to solidify.

Do you use that approach in life as well?
Yes, I think. We are very insecure. People are insecure, not just young people. Everyone is insecure. They say that Barbara Streisand, when she goes on, she has a panic attack. She feels she can’t sing. Of course, she can sing. I believe that when you write something, when I write something, I turn it over and I don’t look at it. Because I believe the writer, the young writer, has a hormone that makes them hate what they’ve written. And yet, the next morning, when you look at it, you say, “Oh that’s not bad.” But the first second you hate it.

Somos lo que hay en Finlandia.

2011-01-17T17:26:00.001-06:00

Paha perhe

Torstai 13.1.2011 klo 15.01

Mä oon mitä oon (Somos lo que hay)
Meksiko 2010
Ohjaus: Jorge Michel Grau

MUISTA MYÖS

Iltalehden Leffaraati

Perhesiteet ja urbaani kauhu sekoittuvat ennennäkemättömällä tavalla nuoren meksikolaisohjaajan tyrmäävän upeassa esikoispitkässä.

Tarina kolmesta kannibaalisisaruksesta ja heidän äidistään käynnistyy, kun perheen isä ei eräänä aamuna palaakaan päivittäiseltä ruoanhakureissulta. Paniikki iskee, sillä muu perhe ei ole koskaan osallistunut ihmismetsästykseen. Jotain on kuitenkin tehtävä, sillä nälkä on kova ja kasvava. Myös rituaali, jolla liha siunataan, on toteutettava ennen keskiyötä.

Onnistuneesti suomennettu Mä oon mitä oon kuuluu viime vuosikymmenen parhaisiin elokuvadebyytteihin. Jorge Michel Grau rakentaa sokeeraavasta asetelmasta tunnelmallisen ja sosiopoliittisen kauhudraaman sekä poikkeuksellisen taitavan perheen valtarakenteiden läpileikkauksen. Elokuvan kerronta kielii tulevan mestarin synnystä. Jylhä laajakangaskuvaus houkuttelee Mexico Citystä hätkähdyttäviä, gotiikan ja urbaanin angstin risteyttämiä kuvia.

Mä oon mitä oon on tarina alasajetuista ja kirjaimellisesti nälkää näkevistä marginaali-ihmisistä. Ennen kaikkea se on kuitenkin tarina perheestä, sen sisäisestä kriisistä ja väkivallan vammauttamasta, kollektiivisesta sielusta. Ja sellaisena Graun "opera prima" on poikkeuksellisen koskettava ja brutaalista sisällöstään huolimatta kaunis elouva.

Siskona ja kahtena veljenä nähtävät Paulina Gaitán, Francisco Barreiro ja Alan Chávez, sekä äitiä esittävä veteraaninäyttelijä Carmen Beato, muodostavat täydellisen kokoonpanon. Etenkin nuorten esiintyminen on hätkähdyttävän herkkää ja vereslihalla olevaa.

Nuorinta veljeä esittävä Alan Chávez ei nähnyt elokuvaa koskaan valmiina. Vasta 18-vuotias näyttelijä menehtyi meksikolaisen katuväkivallan seurauksena pian kuvausten jälkeen.

Conoce un poco más a...: Jorge Michel Grau

2011-01-15T10:10:00.000-06:00

Hoy en Conoce un poco más a... tenemos al director méxicano Jorge Michel Grau, que con su primera película "Somos lo que hay", vista en el pasado Festival de Sitges y en el Off Cinemart donde os pusimos la crítica, ha llamado la atención de la prensa especializada y del publico asistente donde se ha podido ver este notable filme.

Aquí os dejamos el test de 20 preguntas que le hemos hecho y agradecerle a Jorge su amabilidad y desearle suerte de cara al futuro:

1. ¿Que te motivó a ser director?

Crecí viendo todo el cine de los 70's y principios de los 80's en el negocio de videorenta de mi papá. Todo en mi vida tiene una referencia cinematográfica, por eso no entiendo la vida sin cine.

2. ¿De cual de tus trabajos estás más orgulloso?

"Somos lo que hay" sin duda.

3. ¿Qué historia sueñas con dirigir?

La edad de hierro de JM Coetzee.

4. ¿Con quién ardes en deseos de trabajar?

John Turturro y Ellen Burstyn.

5. ¿Si no fuera director de cine habría sido…?

Baterista de una banda mala de rock o chef.

6. ¿Cuál es tu película favorita de todos los tiempos?

Imposible mencionar una: La haine, La Naranja Mecánica, El Padrino, Funny Games, Magnolia y cientos más.

7. Un director clásico y uno actual:

Ingmar Bergman y Michael Haneke.

8. Un actor clásico y uno actual:

Robert de Niro y Paul Dano

9. Una actriz clásica y una actual:

Liv Ullmann y Natalie Portman

10. Una película clásica latinoamericana:

Los olvidados

11. Una película actual latinoamericana:

La vendedora de rosas

12. Una serie de Tv:

Dexter

13. Un libro y un escritor:

Libro: Memorias de una madame americana de Nell Kimball
Escritor: JM Coetzee

14. Un estilo musical, una canción y un grupo o cantante:

Estilo musical: Rock y todos sus subgéneros.
Canción: I Heard You Looking de Yo la tengo
Grupos: Sonic Youth y Pixies

15. Un deporte, un deportista y un equipo:

Deporte: Futbol Soccer
Deportista: Roger Federer
Equipo: Pumas de la UNAM

16. Una comida:

Méxicana, platillo Mole verde o Lengua en salsa verde.

17. Una ciudad y un país:

Ciudad: Barcelona
País: Inglaterra

18. Si pudieras viajar en el tiempo ¿a que época y a que lugar viajarías?.

Visitaría a Napoleón y al Imperio Romano en decadencia.

19. Una virtud y un defecto de ti mismo:

Virtud: Leal hasta el tuetano
Defecto: Leal hasta el tuetano

20. Un sueño por cumplir:

Quitarme la claustrofobia.

We Are What We Are - Hopscotch Films

2011-01-10T21:51:00.000-06:00

We Are What We Are - Hopscotch Films

Dungen - Festival

2011-01-10T19:27:00.000-06:00

Tame Impala - Solitude is Bliss

2011-01-10T19:11:00.000-06:00

Phantogram - When I'm Small (Live on KEXP)

2011-01-09T22:21:00.000-06:00

Phantogram - Running from the Cops (Live on KEXP)

2011-01-09T22:19:00.000-06:00

Phantogram - Futuristic Casket - Live @ Neumos Seattle WA USA 10-14-10

2011-01-09T22:14:00.000-06:00

Tamaryn - Mild Confusion - London

2011-01-09T22:10:00.000-06:00

Swans - Love will tear us apart (cover)

2011-01-07T19:15:00.000-06:00

Deerhoof - Behold a Marvel in the Darkness (2011) [unofficial fan video]

2011-01-07T15:07:00.000-06:00

Portishead - Chase The Tear

2011-01-07T14:42:00.000-06:00

Collateral Murder - Wikileaks - Iraq

2011-01-07T12:01:00.000-06:00

Sub-Division @ Sesiones con Alejandro Franco

2011-01-03T15:48:00.000-06:00

Inhabitants

2011-01-03T12:59:00.000-06:00

Nacho Vigalondo - Master Class 20 Diciembre 2010

2010-12-30T15:40:00.000-06:00

Nacho Vigalondo - Master Class 20 Diciembre from Instituto del Cine Madrid on Vimeo.

FUTURES | 15 to Watch

2010-12-21T12:44:00.001-06:00

By Nigel M. Smith (December 17, 2010)
FUTURES | 15 to Watch
Some of this Fall's 15 to watch.

Since launching the weekly FUTURES column back in April, indieWIRE has profiled a crop of up and comers in the independent film world worth getting to know. This Fall saw a fresh slate of new faces make the cut, running the gamut from a child actor (“Let Me In” star Kodi Smit McPhee) to an established director making a bid for the director’s chair (“Windfall” director Laura Israel).

Among indieWIRE‘s 15 to Watch this season: Rookie feature filmmaker Tanya Hamilton, whose debut “Night Catches Us” made a splash at Sundance and got a theatrical release this fall; Gotham Award-winning “Littlerock” director, who had yet to win the prize for Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You back when the article was originally published; Brooklyn’s reRun theater, a cinema dedicated to independent film outfitted with reclaimed car seats and a full bar; and in a change of pace, Greenland who made it onto the filmmaking map after they made their first Oscar foreign film submission this year.

Below are this Fall’s FUTURES:

FUTURES | Director Laura Israel Takes on Windmills in “Windfall”

An established editor who has worked on numerous music videos including Duran Duran: Decade in 1989. Billy Joel: Greatest Hits Volume III and other work from Keith Richards, Patti Smith and Sonic Youth, spotlighting the dark side of wind energy was perhaps an unlikely motivator for Israel to take on the director role.

FUTURES | “We Are What We Are” Director Jorge Michel Grau

“I’ve always been interested in working with horror,” said Grau. “I’m really fond of horror films from the 1970’s. I’m not really interested in paranormal types of horror but in horror that we find in daily life, at least in Mexico. Right now we have this major war going on with the drug traffickers, and it’s not that uncommon currently in this situation for these guys to cut a person’s head off, substitute it for a pig’s head, and sit him out on the street with a sign on him. That sense of horror that permeates is something I wanted to explore.”

FUTURES | “This Chair Is Not Me” Director Andy Taylor Smith

British photographer Andy Taylor Smith was at the SilverDocs fest this June for the world premiere of his first film, the short “This Chair is Not Me.” By the end of popular documentary event held annually in Silver Springs, Maryland, “Chair” won the Sterling Award for Best Short Film. Smith’s first foray into filmmaking was a natural progression, citing his work in photography projects, which he feels, often took on narrative elements. The film itself centers around a pivotal moment in the life of Alan Martin, a dancer with cerebral palsy who gives workshops and performances, played by newcomer Andre Mahjouri.

FUTURES | “Night Catches Us” Director Tanya Hamilton

Although this marks Hamilton’s feature film debut, she has already gone on to win awards from the Berlin International Film Festival and New Line Cinema for her short film “The Killers” in 1997. That same year, she was the recipient of the Director’s Guild of America Award for Best Female Director. “Night Catches Us” is itself a product of the Sundance Screenwriter and Filmmaker Lab, where she acts as a Fellow.

FUTURES | Canuck Import Richard de Klerk

Canadian actors who move South of the border to kick start their careers are a dime a dozen. Rachel McAdams, Mike Meyers, Michael J. Fox, Ryan Gosling, Sandra Oh - the list is endless. Newcomer, and fellow Canuck Richard de Klerk, who’s worked with Canadian director Carl Bessai twice in “Repeaters” and “Cole,” is following in their footsteps, while at the same time staking out an career as a producer, by serving as Vice President for his family production company Rampart Films.

FUTURES | “Aardvark” Director Kitao Sakurai

Born in Japan, at the age of three Sakurai and his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he went to Japanese school and was admittedly “super shy.” But when he started doing plays, he realized the power behind acting and performing. This led to roles in film (including the aforementioned “Dogma”), which in turn led to an interest in filmmaking.

FUTURES | “Slackistan” Director Hammad Khan

“My mission is to create from scratch a portrait of Pakistan through a series of films,” said a warm and engaging Khan while in Abu Dhabi. “I want to be able to take a country that has no film presence in the world, and give it one.”

FUTURES | Gotham Nominated “Littlerock” Director Mike Ott

The improv resulted in a story of a Japanese brother (Rintaro Sawamoto) and sister (played by the remarkable Atsuko Okatsuka, who also co-wrote the script) who end up finding themselves in Littlerock when their car breaks down. After meeting locals (including a particularly eccentric loner played pitch-perfectly by newcomer Cory Zacharia), the sister is charmed into staying behind while her brother continues on.

FUTURES | Jeff Reichert Takes on the Pillars of Power with “Gerrymandering”

“We started shooting [‘Gerrymandering’] on October 15, 2008, so we’re now at our two year anniversary,” said Reichert who left his job at Magnolia Pictures to take on the filmmaker role. “The great thing about documentaries is that it’s never what is expected. You may go to a state thinking you will be covering something and then it turns out to be something entirely different. The frustrating part is financing…”

FUTURES | “Nuummioq” Puts Greenland On Map With Country’s First Oscar Submission

The film was shot during the summer of 2008 in and around Greenland’s largest community, Nuuk (its title means “a resident of Nuuk”). It follows Malik, a 35-year old carpenter recently diagnosed with a terminal illness who joins his best friend on his last boat trip into the fjords near Nuuk. During this trip, the two friends rediscover their friendship and Malik is given an opportunity to come to terms with his imminent death.

FUTURES | “Dirty Girl” Director Abe Sylvia

“I started out in the theater,” Sylvia said when he sat down with indieWIRE in Toronto. “I did my undergrad work in the theater, and then I was a Broadway dancer for six years. What I realized very quickly when it sort of became my paid job was that what I actually loved was production.”

FUTURES | “Let Me In” Star Kodi Smit McPhee

This past September marked Kodi Smit-McPhee’s second visit to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) as an actor with a film to promote. He’s fourteen.

FUTURES | “Last Train Home” Director Lixin Fan

“Last Train Home” is shot with an observational verite style akin to Frederick Wiseman, though Fan was hard pressed when asked which documentary filmmakers have influenced him. He did cite, however, filmmaker Yung Chang whose film “Up the Yangtze” Fan worked on after a chance meeting during a program called “Made in China” at the Hot Docs festival.

FUTURES | Producer, Editor, Director Adele Romanski

An editor, producer and now trying her hand at directing, Adele Romanski has traveled the gamut behind the camera. She produced David Robert Mitchell‘s “The Myth of the American Sleepover,” as well as Katie Aselton’s directorial debut, “The Freebie,” which screened in the inaugural NEXT section at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival where it was acquired for domestic distribution by Phase 4 Films (and opening theatrically on Friday September 17th).

FUTURES | New York’s Latest Exhibition Space reRun

Across the river in Brooklyn, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass - AKA DUMBO - lies the reRun theater, tucked behind the neighborhood’s restaurant reBar, a gastropub located on the ground floors of an office building. A number of great features make reRun unique, not the least of which is the bar nestled next to the audience.

The Cure A Forest - rare 80's live

2010-12-20T20:33:00.000-06:00