I’m a huge fan of Amat Escalante‘s debut film Sangre, but I was baffled and unimpressed by the Un Certain Regard screening I caught last May of his sophomore piece Los Bastardos. In many ways the story-line of a pair of young migrant Mexican workers who commit a brutal crime reminded me of certain facets from Haneke’s Funny Games. I expect the auteur filmmaker to bring much of the same provocation and similar visual treatment to his next work, Heli.
Scripted by Escalante, this will be set in the world of Mexican drug dealers and I wonder how far the filmmaker who favors “realism” is willing to go to achieve an aesthetic truth. One thing is for sure, it may be an ideal companion piece to another film I recently saw about gangs and border towns in Sin Nombre.
Variety reports that the pic will produced by Jaime Romandia’s Mantarraya Produciones, with filming to begin in a more tolerable month for filming a movie in Mexico (October).