10 · 29 · 21

El otro Tom Is an Approach to ADHD as a Human and Artistic Concern: Laura Santullo

Gustavo R. Gallardo

El otro Tom (2021), written and directed by Rodrigo Plá and Laura Santullo, was presented at the 19th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) in the Mexican Feature Film Section.

The film tells the story of Tom, diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), for which he receives treatment. However, an accident will make Elena, his mother, weary of psychiatric medications. Her refusal to give him drugs will cause social services to threaten to remove him from her custody.

Laura Santullo said that the plot of the film is something that they have carried with them for many years: "Let's say that the origin comes from something that we began to notice as parents, about our own children, and it is somehow as a very peculiar approach to the mental health of children."

The way to approach the issue of mental illnesses in kids at schools and from other areas is a kind of approach, a search for something that "is crooked or needs to be straightened out," explained Santullo.

"We were surprised by that distance from which the child is seen in their behavior, but not in their context or personal history," said the director. She explains that this aspect came to them as a human concern first and that it then became an artistic one.

Rodrigo Plá said that the story takes place in a context in which the State is very attentive to families and their behaviors. Given that the mother is a person who lives off social assistance, "that places her in a relatively vulnerable place", and she asks herself: "What happens when we install the story in a place where the State is very present?"

The character of the mother affects the child's behavior, explained Plá: "She is unstable, impulsive, she became a mother when she was too young and missed out on a lot of life, which shows in the parts about sexuality. It's something that brings her joy in life, but that was completed with the child. The film focuses on the bond between the two of them."

For Plá, it was important that the actors manifest the Mexican-American identity; of a community "so strong and solid that it has that feeling of rootlessness, of belonging to both places and at the same time to neither." In that search, they found Israel Rodríguez Bertorelli (Tom), who despite being the son of Mexicans, does not speak Spanish, so they decided to change the language of the film to English.

"All that bond between the mother and the son was written in Spanish, but we decided to risk it and change it. If we wanted them to communicate, it had to be happen in English," added the filmmaker.