“Do you think people can change?” asks the teenaged son of a murdered sicario in “Sujo,” the blistering, yet cautiously hopeful social drama that’s currently Mexico’s Oscar entry for best international feature film.
The boy’s earnestly vulnerable query, posed to a university professor who’s taken a genuine interest in him, encapsulates the complicated sentiments of people in a country ravaged by drug violence who are collectively wondering if they can ever move forward. The two meet when the young man, Sujo, migrates from a small village in the state of Michoacán to Mexico City.
Can Mexico become something different, away from the vicious claws of its present woes?
Life partners and the co-directors of “Sujo,” Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez want to believe that there’s a different path. In their latest work, they explore what that might look like.
“We can talk about the horrors, we can look into the abyss, but we also need to look beyond the abyss, because we all have to get up every day and continue with our lives, so what do we do with this reality?” says Valadez in Spanish on zoom from their home in Mexico City.
Rondero and Valadez started their filmmaking careers as Mexico’s drug war raged during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012). The urgency and depth of the national crisis compelled them to create narratives addressing the intimate human consequences of the unspeakable carnage around them.
Currently playing at select Cinépolis theaters around the country, “Sujo” tracks the difficult upbringing of a young man trying to escape falling prey to the same fate as his criminal father. But living in poverty and with few avenues to fathom a different way of life makes that a nearly insurmountable mission. That he tries to get away from the chaos and pursue an education makes it a story of small but meaningful triumphs that doesn’t ignore the socioeconomic forces against him.
“Sujo” is the follow-up to the directors’ 2020 masterful feature “Identifying Features” (“Sin señas particulares”) — which they wrote together, and Valadez directed — about a mother whose son disappears on his way to cross the Mexico-U.S. border after being intercepted by a cartel squad who savagely coerce him to join their ranks.
In both cases, the central adolescent in distress is played by fresh-faced star Juan Jesús Varela. The directors first met Varela when he had just turned 15 during the casting for “Identifying Features.” Rondero and Valadez spent a year in the state of Guanajuato interacting with numerous young men from isolated rural communities.
“In those conversations we found many stories of migration, of the displacement of boys who moved to León, to Mexico City or Guadalajara, and others of those who stayed, who were very young and who started working in some way for the local cartels,” says Valadez.
At the time, Varela, whose extroverted personality contrasts with the pensive introspection of the two characters he’s played in Rondero and Valadez’s films, worked as a tourist guide.
“Fer and I always say that if the circumstances of the kids from these communities were different, we would definitely have found Juan Jesús in an acting school or training in some other career related to the arts. But that’s the reality of our country,” adds Rondero.
Actor Juan Jesús Varela plays the titular “Sujo.”
(The Forge)
Rondero wrote the screenplay for “Sujo” with Varela already in mind months before shooting began for “Identifying Features.”
“Juan Jesús’ personality fuels the film, perhaps not in a literal sense, because he is very different from Sujo,” Rondero says. “But they share the spiritual strength to say, ‘All the circumstances in my life oppose this, and yet I wish to do something different.’”
With their approach to the subject matter, Rondero and Valadez are also going against the norm. They have made a conscious decision to not feature images of explicit violence in their work, unlike other Mexican films where the brutality of the cartels is in full display.
“Mexicans have been living with the graphic horror of violence for decades because part of the machinery of criminal organizations is precisely the exploitation of images of terror so that the population lives with fear day in and day out,” says Rondero. “Showing them or not now is more of an ethical than an aesthetic question for filmmakers.”
Instead, the directors dissect the impact on both victims and perpetrators in stories that don’t divide the population across simplistic lines of victimhood, because in Mexico the people who become involved with organized crime are often victims as well — of economic hardship, the state’s disenfranchisement, a lack of opportunities or of violent recruitment.
“Showing the violence does not help you understand it in human terms,” adds Valadez. “It does not help you understand its impact on people or on society.”
Earlier this year, Rondero and Valadez accepted an offer from Netflix to work on the documentary series “Caught in the Web: The Murders Behind Zona Divas” (currently streaming), about a nefarious escort network responsible for the deaths of several women.
The safety they had enjoyed directing fictional narratives disappeared as they, for the first time, faced the dangerous reality known to journalists covering the ongoing drug war.
“When you make a documentary it is inevitable to name names, it is inevitable to make accusations,” says Rondero. “And in Mexico people’s lives are worth so little that it is very easy for that to become the cause for a director to have an act of violence committed against them.”
The making of the series forced them to change their lifestyle out of safety concerns: They hired security and became hyper-aware of whether they were being watched or followed.
“All of this is very unfortunate, but it is the state of things in our country,” Rondero says. “But we remain motivated, we know that there are always costs to doing what we do, and we are always ready to assume those costs.”
In addition to the firsthand testimonies from young men in Guanajuato, “Sujo” was also informed by the work of journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas, whose 2015 book, “Huérfanos del narco” (“Narco Orphans”) was on the directors’ mind. Valdez Cárdenas was murdered in 2017
Given their profoundly personal and artistic engagement with the issues that afflict Mexico, it’s no surprise that they think of the French production “Emilia Pérez,” a musical about a drug lord who undergoes gender transition, as another example of outsiders looking in. The most celebrated films about Latin America, they believe, are those presented with a foreign perspective, because it is the perspective that those in charge of the world’s major festivals understand. But those are not the viewers Valadez and Rondero are working for.
“We have an ethical and political commitment to make films for Mexican audiences, because we are talking about very painful situations, which are urgent,” says Valadez.
“It is a priority for us to be able to address these problems in an empathetic and sincere manner and for Mexican audience to recognize that sincerity.”
So far, Rondero and Valadez had found acclaim at home and abroad without compromising their vision. Both “Identifying Features” and “Sujo” earned awards at the Sundance Film Festival, where they premiered, and the former swept the Ariel Awards (Mexico’s equivalent to the Oscars) winning 11 trophies including best film, best director for Valadez, and best screenplay.
As women, and as lesbians, part of the directing duo’s mandate is to have crews primarily composed of women. For them, the personal is always political, in cinema and in life.
“We are part of a generation of filmmakers with very strong voices and I do believe that a large number of the most important directors in Mexico today are women, but that does not mean that in terms of percentage the balance has yet been evened,” says Valadez.
That dedication to gender parity is certainly not in conflict with what making “Sujo” entailed: trying to understand an experience unknown to them, that of young men from rural communities. They sought to step into that perspective since men are more susceptible to recruitment and violence given how masculinity is configured in Mexico.
“Cinema has the ability to put us in the shoes of another person who doesn’t have your emotional, social and cultural configuration,” explains Valadez. “That is the magic of cinema, it allows you to understand things that you didn’t understand before and to question the reality in front of you.”
Their hope is that films like “Sujo” ignite the beginning of a new way for Mexican storytellers to address the violence and its ramifications, and perhaps even the possibility of a kinder future.
“Cinema is the perfect space to imagine something different,” says Rondero.
