Sujo (2024)

Direction: Astrid Rondero, Fernanda Valadez
Country: Mexico 

Following their debut feature The Darkest Days of Us (2017), Mexican filmmakers Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez reunite for Sujo, a coming-of-age crime drama. The story follows a young boy named Sujo (Juan Jesús Varela), who becomes a target of Mexican cartels due to his lineage. Forced to live in hiding, he eventually leaves the violence-stricken Tierra Caliente of Michoacán for Mexico City, seeking an escape from turmoil and a chance for a dignified and constructive life.

Presented in four uneven chapters, the film offers an innocent perspective on Mexico's drug-related violence. Its narrative fails to evoke a strong emotional connection with the protagonist, never finding deep wells of excitement in a whirlingly divergent romp blending vengeful cartel activity and imminent redemption.This lack of passion makes it difficult to become fully invested in a tale that gives you feelings and impressions, but roundly fails to sell itself as something deeper as its twists are not particularly surprising. Therefore, we ultimately come out of it more numb than fascinated. 

There's a glimmer of interest in the film's narrative contortions, and it's admirable that the directors have taken its subject seriously. However, it's just not thrilling enough. Despite its ambitious themes, Sujo leaves behind a sense of untapped potential.

Identifying Features (2021)

Direction: Fernanda Valadez
Country: Mexico

In Fernanda Valadez’s heartbreaking debut feature, Identifying Features, a 48-year-old woman called Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) sets off to the border between Mexico and the US in a desperate attempt to track down her missing son, Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela). During the perilous route that takes her from Guanajuato to a forbidden rural zone called ‘La Fragua’, she comes across with another woman in the same situation and a deported young man, Miguel (David Illescas), who returns to his village to see his mother. Then she visits an elderly Indian Mexican, a survivor of a bus assault, who might know what happened to her son.

Sorely meditative and minimally composed, the film carries an enormous emotional weight in each frame. The spiky script, co-written by Valadez and Astrid Rondero (they also edited and produced), steadily cranks up its social and emotional charge, at the same time that, even without providing any answer, makes us inquire about Mexico’s unremitting violence. Hernández shines particularly convincing as the unsettling scenes capture the tormenting reality of Mexico’s several degrees of inhumanity.

Identifying Features is a harrowing tale of loss, anguish and disenchantment whose brutally cold conclusions left me stunned.