Mexico's Amat Escalante on
Sunday won the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his ultra-violent
film "Heli" about his country's blood-drenched drug wars.
The 34-year-old director, who
was forced onto the defensive after the violence left some members of the
audience uneasy, paid tribute to this year's Cannes jury headed by Steven
Spielberg.
"This earthquake, I
wasn't expecting this! Thank you to this brave jury... to Mexico, I hope we
never get used to suffering... " he said.
"Heli" tells the
story of a family caught up in gangland battles in an unnamed desert region of
contemporary Mexico and contains protracted torture scenes.
In one scene, a character sets
the genitals of a suspected cocaine thief ablaze.
Escalante reacted to criticism
of the film by calling it an accurate depiction of the situation in underworld
crime-blighted Mexico.
And he dismissed critical
questions about upsetting audiences.
"What's the point of not
showing the violence just so the audience can go through the story and not
suffer so much when actually that's not how violence is in real life?" he
asked reporters.
"I think I'm curious
about sex and death and violence, and so that's all in the film," added
Escalante, whose last picture "Los Bastardos", set among the Mexican
community in Los Angeles, played in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section in 2008.
"Heli" features amateur
actors, telling the story of a police cadet who falls for the 12-year-old
sister of a factory worker named Heli (Armando Espitia).
Film industry bible Variety
called "Heli" "an accomplished but singularly unpleasant
immersion" in the drug wars and noted that it was the most "explicit,
realistically violent film" in the Cannes competition in several years.
However Robbie Collin, a
reviewer for London's Daily Telegraph, said: "Even a bleak existence can
make an uplifting story."
"Heli may be the most optimistic
film you will ever see in which one young man sets another's genitals on
fire," he wrote. (Source)
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