Lucas lives with his mother and sister and works in a fast-food restaurant where he is craftily exploited by his boss. He befriends his co-worker, Oscar, a highly-strung and psychologically unstable rebel. The heavy atmosphere in this industrial Mexican town seems to dialogue with the camera obscura shots: the strangeness of coal-black darkness that even tars the daytime scenes, edgy compositions gnawed by the frame, which convey a feeling of struggle – one appeased for a moment by a splendidly piercing shot of clouds. The artisanal and sometimes experimental form of the film vibrates and resonates poetically, combining the sensation of a hand-made film and the question underpinning all the gestures filmed by José Pablo Escamilla: how to act, resist, inhabit this world, and even make its interstices bear fruit. FM
French Premiere
