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Press Screening of Los ausentes by Nicolás Pereda

Los ausentes / The Absent (2014) by Nicolás Pereda, from the Mexican Feature Film Section in competition of the 12^th FICM, was presented to the press at the Cinépolis Morelia Centro.

Nicolás Pereda has a history at FICM that goes back to 2007, when his debut film,  ¿Dónde están sus historias? (2007), won the Best Mexican Feature Film Award, the first year the award in that category was given. The director is among the most prolific filmmakers of his generation – since his debut in 2007 to date he has made seven feature films and three documentaries. His work has been shown and received awards at festivals around the world.

One of the main features of Pereda’s work is the use of repetition, a recourse that he uses at different times: in sequences and dialogues and with characters and the cast. Another notable aspect is the experimentation around the role of the actor, who can represent a character, represent him/herself or any possibility that ranges between one point and another. Los ausentes portrays a person, who is 70 years old, whose house has been demolished, which compels him to begin a journey into the mountains and the forest, where he finds the echo of his own youth.

Producer Edgar San Juan and screenwriter Alejandro Mendoza attended the press screening.

Alejandro Mendoza on the silences and the atmospheres in the script:

“The script managed silences from the beginning and during the production process. Since you cannot manage those moments in the script, we would put silence 5, for example, and focused on the description of objects to generate these atmospheres. The script involves a search for atmospheres in different environments and geographies of Mexico, from the mountains to the lowlands next to the ocean. In the original script there was a descent into hell and the search of this character who gradually finds himself.”

Edgar San Juan on the production of Los ausentes:

For us, we are proud that the Morelia Film Festival has included Los ausentes in its selection. The film is a co-production with Film Tank of Mexico, Tornasol Film of Spain, and Ciné-Sud Promotion of France. The screenplay won numerous awards, from IMCINE to the Amiens International Film Festival, which supported it as a fund to restructure. It was a very solid script and we decided our best bet was to offer it to a well-known director like Nicolás Pereda to perform an exercise to seek an authorial language that would also work in narrative and dramatic terms, in that descent of a character into hell.”

Edgar San Juan on how they got Nicolás Pereda to direct the film:

“The way we involved him in the project was to ask him to create a film with a different production scheme, based on a script that wasn’t written in stone and could be open for reinterpretation and that something more could be added. It was why Jano and Nicolás sat down to work on the script and restructure it so that it would be closer to what Nicolás was looking for. He uses more silences and it had too many dialogues in his opinion, so we limited the dialogues, giving it a unit that would be closer to the tone that Nicolás was looking for.”

Edgar San Juan on the cast:

“I also think it was very interesting to mix a non-actor like Guadalupe Cárdenas, who is a wonderful man originally from Oaxaca, with a known actor like Eduard Fernández. Thanks to this co-production scheme it was possible to do it.”

Edgar San Juan on the relationship between producers of other countries with those from Mexico:

“Now in Spain, where production has decreased remarkably, they are looking at Mexico, but now not as a younger brother that it has to support, but as a brother who they see face to face to ask for support and request co-productions so that on both sides of the Atlantic projects can be developed. Whether it means shooting the film in Mexico and doing post-production in Spain or that it is shot in Spain and the post-production is done in Latin America. It’s a good time for co-productions.”

The premiere of Los ausentes will take place at a gala on Wednesday, October 22, at 3:45 pm at Cinépolis Morelia Centro, with a carpet and the presence of the talent.

Coverage by Gabriel Andrade Espinosa (@gabolonio)