Escalante’s cinema will always be for me a reason of celebration: I remember each screening of one of his movies, like a commotion that revives when I witness the madness or the eagerness of stigmatization that he provokes due to his disparate tastes. Some get infuriated when their director gets celebrated in Cannes or Venice with an award.
In the middle of an amused festival, Escalante’s films breaks through making you stop. It’s what shakes you within a transcendent cinema disguised as calm. Escalante’s capacity to generate seismic movement doesn’t comes from a fortunate perk, instead it’s born from hit of cathartic wisdom, situated within its plots in a certain way, with the strength of a clean slate and the precision of a surgeon of holy blood, as a device whose shock wave revolutionizes the Mexico you’ve already seen – in Los Bastardos or in Sangre, where the explosion occurs towards the end – or whats left to see like in Heli, where there’s a before and after in his famous act of torture needed to enfuriate and to put in value the frame of that rute more nihilistic than wild, where life is less than zero.
Escalante’s lucidity turns us on, the one you never see coming and that rapidly concentrates moral and class putrefaction of his Mexico not only on the human ferocity but also in the tentacles of an alien that guarantees a perpetual orgy. A philanthropic monster that strips us at the price in (multi) orgasm of the human will otherwise condemn to mental castration. And what’s better, that your beloved monster devours your body and soul.
José Luis Losa
Cineuropa Festival Director (Santiago de Compostela)
