Frío metal follows a form of exploration of Mexican youth, already present in Príncipe de Paz (FID 2019), through the story of two brothers, Mario and Óscar. What was the starting point for this new film?
I think the obsessions remained the same as with my first film, except now we’d grown a little, and those concerns and discomforts manifested themselves in different ways. While before there was more exploration of the territory and space that surrounds us, now those spaces and uncertainties manifested themselves in our own bodies, in the illnesses we suffer, in addictions, in family abandonment, in a feeling of being adrift and directionless. I think it’s a feeling that most young people who live or grow up on the outskirts of the city come to feel. I’d say it was there, in the transformation of the body or the imagining of what constructs us physically within us, that made me begin to imagine this film. It was also traversed by these processes of transformation and pain in a masculinity that is violent, that stereotypes and desensitizes us. Although the violence is never explicit in the film, it permeates and manifests itself in the bodies of the adolescents, through their dreams, through sudden shifts in spatiality, through the memory of the destroyed land, and through the sounds of their own bodies. It is a film dedicated to the young people who live adrift on the outskirts of Mexico City, and more specifically in the eastern part of the city, Iztapalapa. The area is primarily made up of working-class families who migrated to the city in the 1980s and settled on the outskirts of the metropolis.
Apart from Lázaro Rodriguez, the performers seem to be non-professional actors who bear their names in the film. How did you choose them? What methods did you use to work with them? Did they collaborate in writing the film?
I’ve known Mario and Oscar since 2016. I think that over time, we’ve somehow grown together. And while we have a working relationship, we’re also friends. And over the years, we would get together to talk and catch up on what was happening in our lives. It was during those conversations that the story also adapted greatly to what they were experiencing at the time. The three of us proposed some scenes and ideas. Some were filmed and others weren’t, and several scenes were also left out of the final cut.
With the other non-professional actors, the process was even more natural, as I was very interested in their personalities and what they did; they were also people I’d met before. An example of this is Beatriz, who does the card reading. She’s a longtime friend of my mother’s, and she’s truly a witch, who does card readings for a living. While it’s not her full-time job, she does do readings for people close to her or whoever pays for it. For her, card reading is “asking the gossips,” as she calls it. In these cases, there’s no specific script, just a few key words or dialogue suggestions. I wouldn’t call it improvisation, but there is freedom in the use of words.
About Lorena, who is the woman with whom the film opens in the roulette game. I met her one night while working at the fair. Her voice and chant mesmerized me from the start, and it wasn’t until months later, after thinking about the game, that I realized she should open the film.
And so, I could talk about the other non-professional actors with whom I have a more or less a close relationship.
Games—of chance, hands games, board games—appear at several points in the film, some of them opening onto other worlds. What do they mean to you? In what way do they also serve as plot devices?
I think they’re games that open portals. And in their playful sense, they accompany the interplay that exists with the perception of time and the narrative within the film. They’re moments in which time contracts or unfolds, or one can advance to another space. I was also interested in the unpredictable chance. It made me think about how the film could be edited or not? And that perhaps it depended on which squares the dice landed.
I was also interested in their historical meaning and the relationship we have with these games. The last game shown in the last part of the 8mm B&W, “Poleana”, is a game invented in a prison in Mexico. Basically, you advance squares by rolling dice, and the goal is to avoid being caught by the police. It was a game that reached the streets when inmates were released from prison and the only game that exists is homemade boards. I think it’s a game that synthesizes this life of the street, of the peripheral, and the marginal. Whatever is taken as the centre.
Frío metal establishes a parallel between the human body and the earth, both in the narrative—the fact that we penetrate bodies through underground cavities—and in the structure of the film itself. Could you comment on this dimension? How did you work it into the editing?
That was the first image or seed image that sparked the film. People walking through someone else’s body or walking inside ourselves. Finding buried fragments of memory or even the future. In this sense, the editing was simple; once we reached these moments in the mine/cave, we could go anywhere. Here, the choice was to leave these fictional moments and enter these documentary fragments shot in 8mm in black and white within the rehabilitation centre. These scenes were shot later in parallel with the editing, which, for me, is part of the writing process. The black and white was always conceived as another timeline for the film. These moments could very well be memories from within the mine/cave or fragments of the future of that story. That’s where the linearity of the narrative breaks down, giving it a sense of abstraction. Something that can’t be fully contained.
The film has as much a supernatural dimension as a documentary one. What interests you in this double scope?
I think I’ve always been interested in reality, in what I see, in the world I connect with as I walk and get lost. There were many things about Iztapalapa I wanted to film like the big dance parties with MCs, the motorcycles, the fairs at night, the esoteric. But I’m also interested in what we don’t see, what isn’t so easy to perceive. The darkness that exists in this space, and not in a pejorative sense, but rather in that equal gravitational force. That attracts, which generates syncretisms in terms of religion, or that is simply irrational. And I think that in this space between reality and my desire is also where this kind of dialectic is generated. Between what’s in my head and that interpretation of darkness that I perceive, in how I imagine it. In this sense, I’ve always been very open to the world, and that’s why, despite these supernatural elements, there is always a lot of reality or documentary. Because this is there, and for me, it’s important to pay attention to it.
The presence of the mine evokes, through the exploitation of its resources and their transformation, telecommunications systems and thus the virtual transposition of the self. Could you elaborate on the presence of this element and this dual aspect in the film?
Initially, at least during the writing stage of the film, there was an emphasis on mining as a means of extracting natural resources for the creation of technology. Specifically, cell phones and media. It was a more present element within the plot, or a more direct relationship between images, mining and technology. I think that’s still present, but in a much more diluted way, because it’s one thing to write this relationship in fiction, and another to actually reach the space of this mine. While this relationship is explicit, there are other things that are even more so. And for me, it made direct sense with the violence exerted when drilling into the earth. I thought about it now more in terms of a direct relationship to the violence that exists in this part of the country and how this machinery, whether in the form of a space-destroying machine or a colonial war machine, can destroy bodies and a conception of the self, whether virtual or physical.
Interview by Louise Martin Papasian
