Natalia López Gallardo, a director born in Bolivia and with Mexican nationality, won this Wednesday one of the most important prizes at the Berlinale 2022, the Silver Bear, with her new film Gem Mantle. The film, written, directed and co-produced by López Gallardo herself, deals with the issue of disappearances and drug violence from the experience of three women: María, Isabel and Roberta.
Isabel, played by Nailea Norvind, is going through a divorce process and settles with her children in a rural area where she discovers that her assistant María, played by Antonia Olivares, is looking for her missing sister. “It’s going to be a year that we look for her,” she tells him the latter. Isabel then offers all her help to find her, and in the difficult process they come across the police commander in the area, Roberta (played by Aída Roa), whose son has been linked to organized crime. The son, Adán, is played by Juan Daniel García Treviño, known in Mexico as the protagonist of the 2019 film I’m not here anymore. Isabel will not only encounter the risks of drug traffickers in her search, but also the endless bureaucracy of the State to demand justice. According to figures from the National Registry of Disappeared Persons, at least 94,000 people have disappeared in Mexico since 1964.
“More than violence or drug trafficking, the film talks about the fear that can be generated in a society where there is no common project, where people are adrift, where they only want to save their skin and nobody thinks about the common good”, told the director from Berlin to EL PAÍS.
Gem Mantle It is the director’s first feature film but not the first film project in which she has participated. your short film In heaven as on earth, about two boys abandoned by their mothers, won the award for Best Experimental Short Film at the Morelia Film Festival in 2006. She has also worked with filmmakers Amat Escalante, Lisandro Alonso and her husband, Carlos Reygadas. She was editor of Silent light of Reygadas (2007), and actress in Our time, film by the same filmmaker, from 2018.
López Gallardo has said that for his film he was inspired by life stories in the Mexican state of Morelos, where he has lived for 13 years. “I have witnessed the progressive collapse of the social fabric,” he explains in a statement. “I have two children and I imagine, half dreaming, through the fog, the daily life of parents with murdered or missing children, which is enough to bring me the darkest of sadness.”
To write the script and do the casting of the film, the director tells how she met a family that had kidnapped a man from their own home. The father of the household worked as a taxi driver, the boys continued to attend school, and the family seemed kind and generous to their neighbors. “They needed more money,” they told her, to justify the kidnapping from her home. “Mexico is like a God with many faces and the same number of contradictions,” says the director.
The López Gallardo award is one more symbol of the international attention that women in Mexican cinema have begun to absorb, and that it is no longer only won by the three musketeers of Mexican cinema (Del Toro, Iñárritu, Cuarón). Last year two excellent films by Mexican directors were awarded and celebrated by critics that also deal with the issue of violence in Mexico from the life story of female protagonists –Fire night by Tatiana Huezo, and No Particular Signs by Fernanda Valdez. At the Berlinale, in addition, three more films by Mexican directors also premiered: north over the void by Alejandra Marquez God’s kingdom by Claudia Sainte-Luce, and Soul and Peace by Chris Gray.
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