- Mexico is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. But courageous reporters continue to do their work regardless; without the press there would be no one revealing the extent to which crime and politics are intermingled. The judicial system hides behind claims of insufficient evidence to prosecute crimes, while journalists are the ones who provide such evidence. In State of Silence four journalists discuss their work. One of them investigates illegal logging and environmental pollution, while another writes about police violence against migrants attempting to cross the border. The risks are great, and threats are commonplace. Almost 200 reporters have disappeared or been murdered since 2000. A law was passed under President López Obrador enabling journalists and human rights activists to seek refuge in the US—but doesn’t leaving everything that you love behind you, mean the criminals have won? Some of the journalists return to Mexico because their work is too important. “When a journalist is murdered,” says one of them, “society’s right to be informed dies, too.”
- Set in 1978, the film marks the fourth joint effort between Monzón and Jorge Guerricaechevarría, and tells the action-packed, adrenaline-fuelled story of 17-year-old Nacho Cañas, an introverted student who lives in Girona and who is something of a misfit. When he meets El Zarco and Tere, young delinquents from the city’s Chinatown district, he gets caught up in a love triangle that leads him to indulge in an unrelenting onslaught of thievery, burglary and hold-ups that will change his life forever. The film is the chronicle of the summer during which Nacho experienced his first love and came of age, constantly crossing the boundary between two worlds, and overstepping the line that exists between right and wrong, between justice and injustice.
