‘Sujo’, the film that Mexicans Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez are premiering this Monday at the San Sebastian Film Festival, It is the result of the reflection of its directors on the possibilities that the orphan of a hitman may have to escape the circle of violence with adequate support.
“In Mexico, the problem of the number of orphans resulting from organized crime has not been discussed in depth,” Rondero explains in an interview with EFE alongside Valadez and the Argentine actress Sandra Lorenzano, who plays the role of a teacher in the film.
When Rondero and Valadez were doing research for their previous film (together they filmed ‘The Darkest Days of Us (2017) and ‘Without Distinctive Marks’, in 2020), they spoke to children from rural communities and their main alternatives were migration or belonging to some kind of cartel.
“They are very vulnerable to being recruited because there is a false sense of community, of belonging, but then we realize that most of these kids die before they are 30,” adds Valadez.
This is where the directors asked themselves what would happen to these young people if they were to leave that environment and society gave them the opportunity to have another life, to have free will.
In the case of ‘Sujo’ (Juan Jesús Varela), the support of women like his aunt (Yadira Perez Esteban) helps him first to survive the condemnation of being the son from a traitorous father and then to try to rebuild his life far away.
In this second stage, the role played by the Argentine Sandra Lorenzano is crucial, for whom there are similarities between her character and that of the young man. “Although they come from a different world, they are two migrant solitudes who meet in a country like Mexico, where migration and displacements forced by economic circumstances or violence are frequent,” she emphasizes.
The protective network that women weave around themselves Sujo They make a violent destiny that seemed inexorable seem to have a glimmer of being overcome. “I read the story of ‘Sujo’ as a kind of new birth, there is another possible life and it will depend on him once he knows that and knows that he can transform himself,” the Argentine performer and essayist remarks.
The film makes clear the power of education, both academic and family-related (in this case from a family that is barely biological on his aunt’s side, but who has decided to help him).
“In many of these communities, civil society is in the hands of women, because men migrate, and we thought it was important to talk about how these women shape the personality of a boy who finally manages to change that destiny that seemed imperturbable,” say the directors.
For them, Mexico has the contradiction of having, on the one hand, a generation of young people thrown into the culture of drug trafficking and, on the other, institutions like the National University, which is completely free.
But Rondero and Valadez also speak of “hidden inheritances”, of the formation of Sujo’s personality by those around him, including the contradictions of a delinquent but loving father towards his son or an aunt whose revenge is not violence, but the possibility of her nephew escaping what seems to be a closed destiny.
“It’s not that kids have to be brilliant or special to get out of the circle,” they insist, but rather it is the circumstances of those who surround them that allow them to build their personality. “We are all a concatenation of the experiences of the people who shaped us and I think that was the intention with ‘Sujo’, “That all these women end up building a young man who has the possibility of changing his life and is a good man,” she said.
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