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Top 20 Alternative Picks for Cannes 2013: Amat Escalante’s Heli

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Heli – Amat Escalante

Section: Main Competition

Buzz: Steadily guided by Cannes’ fest head honcho Thierry Fremieux, Amat Escalante receives a major big stage showing for his long-awaited third film (worth noting it was among the four hand-picked winners for the 2010 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards along with Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Elena” and Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild“). Sangre (Un Certain Regard – 2005), his debut feature announced the helmer as an up-and-comer in Mexican cinema, while his home-invasion follow-up Los Bastardos divided up the critical mass when it showed once again in Cannes in 2008 (Un Certain Regard).

The Gist: In a small Mexican town, where most citizens work for an automobile assembly plant or the local drug cartel, Heli is confronted with police corruption, drug trafficking, sexual exploitation, love, guilt and revenge in the search for his father who has mysteriously disappeared.

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Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).

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