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Diana Cardozo: Estación Catorce "A Film to be Experienced"

Gustavo R. Gallardo

The film Estación Catorce (2021), written and directed by Diana Cardozo, was presented at the 19th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) in the Mexican Feature Film Section.

Estación Catorce revolves around how Luis discovers the world at the age of seven through the violence that touches his environment; his first encounter with death, the discovery of his father's fragility, the mandates of masculinity and the vulnerability of the world that surrounds him. Everything happens between games and perplexities, in a violent Mexico, where growing up implies danger.

Director Diana Cardozo says the film is "a bet directly linked to passing on that experience, passing it back to the viewer in some way. It is not a conceptual film, but rather a film to be experienced."

In addition, she said that she was interested in the experience of children who are going through this moment of violence in the country, "a complex reality that has spread over time much longer than is desirable." Luis, the character, "has a premature to his childhood ".

However, she clarifies: "It is not a film that presents all the drama of the country through a boy, but through how he internalizes that reality, that reality is mixed with games, and that reality is what makes you grow."

Producer Martín Boege said that when he met Diana "there was no doubt that we were going to make this film (...) In visual terms, it was a real pleasure, a very considerable challenge, and it took us from one thing to another from the concepts until landing, which at times was a crash landing, but others it was truly discovering a world."

The actor José Antonio Becerril, who plays Luis's father, said that "it was a whole search to find, above all, the fragility of the character; what happens is that Manuel doesn't know how to be a father. It is not a situation that has arisen in his life, so what the film does a bit is to synthesize the history of these two characters and as the film unfolds, he finds himself discovering how to be a father. "

And he adds: "So, the film is about the moments in which Manuel wonders what it is to be a father and what it implies if he opens up more in a Mexican society, which is a society of absent parents."