The Mexican film “Los Plebes” tells the daily life of a group of hitmen from a completely different perspective than it used to be. “With ‘Los Plebes’ we want to counteract the damage done”, said Eduardo Giralt, one of the directors.
“I don’t think cinema can change anything, that sounds too narcissistic to me, (…) but cinema can do a lot of damage and I feel like cinema has done a lot of damage here,” he explained in an interview with Efe Giralt, who made the film together with Emmanuel Massu.
The documentary “Los Plebes” is one of eleven Mexican productions that will be in the eleventh edition of the festival of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and which chooses the Puma de Plata, and which will also be online in addition to this competition. released. because of the pandemic.
“I may have gotten a bad taste for looking for another festival with a little bit more red carpet. (…) Any kind of ‘glorification’ of cinema, especially tackling these kinds of issues, makes me hypocritical,” he added.
The film tells the close-up story of a group of young hitmen who roam Sinaloa (northwestern Mexico) as they deal with growth, the future and what they share with most guys their age: you had fun, were looking for a girlfriend or played video games.
“This is a film about teenagers who were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time and in the wrong social circumstances,” the festival’s website said.
NO RETURN
For the director, whose previous film “The Weak” (2017) already delves into these kinds of subjects, and for Massu, the other director, there is no going back once you start making this kind of cinema, which engrossed in the stories and those who live them while fleeing the spectacular development of drug trafficking and violence.
Giralt wonders how it is possible that so far only films have been made in Mexico that tell stories about drug trafficking from different points of view and far from the stereotype.
In this sense, he said that Froylán Enciso, a historian from Sinaloa who specializes in the political economy of drugs and Mexican politics, once told him, “Eduardo, you’re filming the tiger’s fingernails.”
By this he meant that ‘the heart and the brain’ also had to be filmed, that is, ‘pharmacists and money launderers’.
“Nobody talks about it because it’s the most dangerous. What I’m going to do is: I’m not saying you try to make it into a documentary, because it must be very deadly to try to tell it that way, but why in all fiction cinema? has no one focused on that? Ah, because the other is the most violent, the most yellowish, “he thought.
IN FIRST PERSON
The Venezuelan director, who studied law as a young man and then focused on a more intimate and ‘far from social’ cinema, arrived in Mexico and as a result of ‘Los Plebes’ opportunities arose to work as a ‘fixer’ ( producer who contributes to the production of reports by searching for sources, translation or as a guide).
It was then that he realized how much he enjoyed extreme areas.
“I no longer want to sit in the hidden ivory tower, drink coffee at a Starbucks while writing a script. I realized this was the opposite of what I wanted in life,” he thought at the time.
Since then, just like in “Los Plebes”, he wanted to see things in the first person. “Without anyone telling me,” he added.
However, the work and approach of both directors carries a risk, as, he explained, “once you come into contact with organized crime, you are always on their radar”.
And while the filming was rather “smooth”, the risks don’t stop when the cameras are turned off.
“What scares me the most is that someone else will be harmed. If they screw me, I would feel sorry for my parents, but … But something happens to someone close to me, is something that keeps me going all the time keeps awake. ” .
So they tried to take every precaution and, instead of going into self-censorship, they tried to be respectful and not see why anyone could be offended by ‘Los Plebes’.
“I say these guys (young people) have been portrayed in a very Manichean way, but I’m not saying ‘oh, they are saints’. (…) That said, I wouldn’t put my hands in the fire because someone who was in the movie doesn’t bother to see a pod (thing), ”he concluded.