Interview: Amat Escalante – Lost in the Night

From the very onset with his feature debut Sangre (2005), filmmaker Amat Escalante has proposed a cinema of provocation that simultaneously critiques corruption and violence, and culminates in disheartening statistics (and tragedy) for his adoptive Mexico. For his fifth feature film, Escalante leans on the some of the same matter but as explored with 2016’s The Untamed, he is “mining” within entirely new genre blueprints. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in the Premieres section, Lost in the Night (Perdidos en la Noche) delves into moral consciousness while navigating a landscape tainted by corruption, and is once again rooted on the ever-changing dynamics shifting social class paradigms.

I got to speak to Amat at the Festival du nouveau cinéma – which is where I first discovered his cinema way back in 2005. After Los bastardos (2008) and Heli (2013) and Venice Film Fest preemed The Untamed (visit my previous interview), Lost in the Night falls into thriller genre with a bit of biting satire and in some interactions felt telenovela-like. We discussed how the film was developed, how they found the mansion – which is a a fun playground for the cesspool that exists and concluded with where he might move towards for his next feature.