07 · 06 · 23

Carlos Enderle's MINEZOTA: Love, Sex and Religion

Rafael Aviña

Rafael Aviña

Translator, Andrea Cabrera

In its 13th edition, in 2015, the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) provided a new and important stimulus that today continues to support the careers of young filmmakers with works in process. That stimulus was the award Impulso Morelia, whose first winners of that year were the documentary Plaza de la Soledad, by Maya Goded, and the fiction feature film Minezota, by Carlos Enderle, which was set in the populous City Nezahualcóyotl, where a series of chronicles that converge with each other are narrated.

A year later, Minezota (2016), owner of an effective rhythm and an admirable black and white photograph by Raúl Campero, was exhibited in Morelia and this week, seven years later, it opens commercially.

Carlos Enderle debuted in 2009 with the intriguing and funny film Crónicas Chilangas, where three main characters: a robust woman fascinated with pornography, a schizophrenic convinced of the presence of aliens and a retired professor with a paraplegic daughter, intertwine their stories.With a similar tone and carried out independently, Enderle inserts a story written by himself in the heart of Neza City, in which he tells several vignettes that come together at one point.

Mexican cinema has little use for the portrait of the working class and the students of the suburban neighborhoods that surround Mexico City. Neighborhoods such as La Roma, Condesa, Juárez, Coyoacán, Centro Histórico and others are usually cosmopolitan areas with aspirational and romantic stories that to a large extent the commercial Mexican cinematography go for. On the other hand, conurbated areas seem to be synonymous of violence and filth, therefore, the treatment that Enderle brings to Minezota is striking, breaking with that stigma that began from the first film story that portrayed that municipality: QRR/Quien resulte responsable (1970) by Gustavo Alatriste, assisted then by the young Arturo Ripstein and Paul Leduc. This documentary with multiple interviews, which discovered the evolution and internal governance of the then very conflictive Nezahualcóyotl City, as a kind of microcosm of Mexico City itself with its deficiencies, corruption, violence and broken illusions and with some notable moments such as that of the arrested young man who explains the way he defended himself from his aggressor.

Despite its low budget and its guerrilla filmmaking, Enderle gets a dignified and entertaining story in which the soundtrack and the montage look effective to tell other suburban chronicles. The chronicles of Violeta (Guillermina Campuzano), a kindergarten educator determined to have a child, Ismael (Pablo Abitia), her distant, interested and womanizing boyfriend, leader of Shambala, a techno rock band -inspired by Depeche Mode- and a couple of young Mormon preachers: Elder Rasmunson (Evan Lamagna) and Elder Casillas (Hansel Ramírez) who hides his true sexual preference. A black and ironic humor, a total rejection of melodramatic formulas, marginal characters and an enormous appreciation of popular strata, as well as a mockery of the precepts of morality place Enderle as a sort of contemporary follower of those little appreciated and socially committed stories, made in the seventies and eighties by José El Perro Estrada.