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"Everybody Trusts Corruption" but Los minutos negros is About Justice: Mario Muñoz

Gustavo R. Gallardo

Los minutos negros (2021), by Mario Muñoz, was presented at the 19th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) as part of the Mexican Feature Film Section.

The film is an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Martín Solares, who at a press conference as co-writer said that the story stems from an urban legend that was heard of in Tampico, Tamaulipas, when he was about five years old.

"There was a person who killed several girls after stalking them when they left school. That urban legend was repeated several times in my childhood; it was not an isolated case. I was obsessed and 20 years later I tried to write a novel about it; It only took me 10 years and I have written it twice: first as a novel, alone, and later as a script, with Mario Muñoz. It is the novel in which I have invested half my life, "he said.

The writer and screenwriter, after recognizing the "wonders" the cast worked with the novel, said that Los minutos negros "is a fictional story that tries to create its own time and its own place. The result for me is a very intense kind of colorful dream that takes us to the heart and the most sinister of the seventies, and I think that from the first five minutes it will make everyone hold their breath for a while until that outcome – which I think is amazing."

Director Mario Muñoz (Bajo la sal, 2008) recognized the role of art direction, since it's a film set in the 1970s, the color palette "was going to be a symphony of maroons, because I remember that that's how the seventies were, everything was brown or beige or maroon, as if colors were expensive."

"Something that I've liked a lot now that people have started to see the film is that they highlight its good taste, the setting, the atmosphere, and all these things," said the filmmaker.

"Los minutos negros is not an intellectual exercise in finding who the murder is. We are not chasing the Zodiac Killer," said Mario Muñoz, pointing out that, in Mexico, corruption can be trusted to hinder an investigation rather than help vent it.

"It really is almost a moral decision for whoever is going to jump to solve a case," rather than trying to find out who is the culprit, he said, adding: "Everyone trusts corruption, that everything can be fixed with money, in people not doing their job and everything being fixed underwater, and I really feel very happy to be able to speak in this film about a justice and a case that has less to do with a great intellectual mystery and more with a decision to say 'we are going or not going after this person and what are we going to do'.

Los minutos negros, starring Carlos Aragón, Enrique Arreola, Sofía Espinosa and Leonardo Ortizgris, addresses the murder of the journalist who investigated the murders of several students and shows the complicity of the political system and the police with organized crime, all set in the seventies.