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The Distance from One's Own Story: César Díaz Presents MEXICO 86 at the 22nd FICM

Berenice Andrade

It took a while for the first question to be asked although the woman in the audience who asked to speak already had the microphone in her hands. With tears in her eyes, she apologized for not being able to articulate her question; Mexico 86 had shocked her.

“That's why I don't watch the film,” said César Díaz, its director.

Mexico 86, the most recent film by the Belgian-Guatemalan filmmaker and jury member of the Mexican Short Film Section of the 22nd Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) was presented at the Teatro Melchor Ocampo.

Based on his own life story, the film depicts the reunion between a revolutionary and her son in the context of the Guatemalan genocide. Maria, a Guatemalan revolutionary activist, has been in exile in Mexico for years, where she continues her political activism. When her 11-year-old son moves in with her, she has to make the difficult choice between her role as a mother and her life as an activist.

“Knowing the price to be paid to transform society seems to be the most important thing to me,” the director commented in the Q&A session at the end of the screening.

“The distancing process is the first stage of bringing it to fiction,” he said regarding how to bring part of his story to film, “it does have to do a lot with my memories, but for me, it was important not to romanticize the revolutionaries as the heroes they could be seen as, but rather as humans with contradictions that should be questioned.”

On the difficulties he encountered in developing the project, he said: “I made the film I wanted. There were mistakes along the way, but at the end of the day, I was lucky to have producers, sales agents and distributors who accompanied me. But the bottom line is that this film should be Guatemalan and not Franco-Belgian.”

The director concluded by thanking the young actor Matheo Labbé, the film's protagonist, for “grabbing the character and taking him as far as he took him”.

The first question took a while to arrive and, when it did, he answered with a resounding affirmative: making this film changed his life. “I'm not the same person.”