Mexican film on migrants is a rebuke to Trump
A movie showing the plight of Mexicans who enter the United States in search of work is expected to become an indictment of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The movie’s director, Jon·s Cuarón, has asked fellow Mexicans who attend the premiere of his movie “Desierto” [Desert] to take a “selfie” of themselves holding a card with one of the names used by Trump to describe Mexican migrants and send it to the Instagram account #LasPalabrasSonTanPeligrosasComoLasBalas [Words Are as Dangerous as Bullets].
“I promise you that I will get those pictures into Trump’s office,” Cuarón said at a special showing of the movie last week in Mexico City, according to the newspaper La Jornada.
In his presidential announcement speech on June 16, 2015, Trump said that Mexican immigrants “have lots of problems.” “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”
On July 6, 2015, he issued a statement confirming those words, saying that “the Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States […] criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.”
The movie will have its U.S. premiere on Friday [April 15]. Trump’s accusations serve as a voice-over introduction to one of the film’s trailers. To see it, click here.
Cuarón (“Gravity,” 2013) appeared at a press conference last week in Mexico City with his father, Alfonso, who is one of the producers, and actors Gael García Bernal and Alondra Hidalgo. Earlier, the movie was previewed at a nearby cinema.
García and Hidalgo play Mexican migrants who enter the U.S. with others looking for work but run into a psychotic vigilante (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan) armed with a sniper’s rifle and accompanied by a hunting dog.
Given a special preview at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 13, 2015, the film won plaudits from the daily Variety, which summarized it as a “nightmare vision of murderous xenophobia run amok.”
Bernal, the review says, “convinces completely as an ordinary, good-hearted guy who’s able to stay consistently one step ahead of his hunters,” while Morgan plays “a persuasively ruthless, scary and, finally, rather pathetic figure.”
Variety’s prediction: “Desierto probably isn’t going to make Donald Trump’s Top-10 list.”
For the complete review, click here.
[Photo at top: Alfonso Cuarón, left, producer, and Jonás Cuarón, director.]
