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Una Película de Policías, Beyond Mere Entertainment: Alonso Ruizpalacios

Gustavo R. Gallardo

Una película de policías (2021), co-written and directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios, was presented at the 19th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), within the Mexican Feature Film Section.

The film is a cinematographic experiment that plays with the limits of fiction and documentary, to put the spotlight on the police, one of the most controversial institutions in Mexico, and the crisis of impunity caused by a dysfunctional system.

The idea of the film began about three years ago "as a need to do something that went beyond entertainment, it was like a need, perhaps a bit naive, to feel useful (...) because I don't think cinema is very useful" said director Alonso Ruizpalacios.

"Originally, the first thing we were going to do was a documentary about the crisis of corruption and impunity in Mexico," he said, for which he met weekly with the producers Daniela Alatorre and Elena Fortes and talked about how they could address the subjects.

"We interviewed specialists in public security issues. It was a very organic process to find the issue and police officers were always what interested us most, what we talked about most, what we read about: the figure of the policeman, and it seemed the most cinematographic too," Ruizpalacios recounted.

Regarding the creative process, he added that he couldn't say he has an agenda, but for him to decide to film something, it must be "something that robs me of my sleep and keeps me coming back to think about it again. If that doesn't happen, I drop it; I know that's not the idea."

In addition, he said that he interviewed several police officers and discovered that they all have a story to tell, "about things that happen to them all the time, and I tell stories, so I think I connected with the policemen through their stories."

Producer Elena Fortes said that with Una película de policías she realized that fiction and documentary are much closer than it seems, "and Alonso, in all his films, experiments in this field and breaks the fourth wall, and we wanted to somehow get in there to tell this police story in an innovative and engaging way for a very wide audience."

Daniela Alatorre was aware that they would not film a documentary as such, "and we wanted to meet these narrative games that Alonso always applies in his films in the way he researches to make them... Finally, there is a search for the game that was interesting for us."