“Son of Monarchs” (2020), the most recent film by Alexis Gambis, arrived this week in movie theaters in Mexico, after a successful tour at festivals where won the Alfred P. Sloan Awards from the Sundance Film Festival (2021) -which meant its international premiere- and New American Cinema from the Seattle International Film Festival (2021). The film stars Tenoch Huerta and continues the issues raised by the Franco-Venezuelan filmmaker and biologist in his trilogy of short films “The Monarch Triptych.”
According to the story, after the death of his grandmother, a Mexican biologist who lives in New York returns after many years to his hometown in Michoacán, a town surrounded by forests where monarch butterflies live; the journey forces him to confront past traumas and reflect on his new hybrid identity, launching him into a personal and spiritual metamorphosis that culminates in the recovery of his family and identity.
migration and survival
In interview with THE REPORTERthe director of the film, Alexis Gambis, points out that he is a biologist by training and in his productions he talks about the relationship between animals and people, “how to talk about the animal to refer to the human situation around migration and survival”.
The origin of this project is found in the monarch butterfly, which migrates from Canada to Mexico and what it ritually represents, the environmental danger that its reduction means due to deforestation in Michoacán; In short, “it was the monarch who led me to make the tape and play all the songs. But above all, it is a film about identity, physically and metaphorically, looking for who we are in an existentialist and multiple way”.
Likewise, by bringing together a cast where great names in acting in the country coexist -not only tenoch orchardsino Noé Hernández, Angelica Aragón, Paulina Gaitán o Angelina Pelaez– The director comments that he discussed the project with everyone; “The first to join was Tenoch, through a friend in Mexico City, we talked about representation, diversity and the importance of science, which made him get involved in the creation of the character; the same happened with Noé Hernández, interested in environmental issues; I already knew Paulina, for example. What I think, in the end, that attracted the actors is that it is a different film, and as a director I gave them the opportunity to intervene in the creation of their roles.
fiction and science
Finally, “Hijo de monarcas” establishes that science can be talked about through fictional stories, and opens a gap in national cinema; Gambis affirms that “being a biologist and merging science with fiction is a discourse that involves the message, including music; I started a movement to formalize these issues, ‘The new scientific wave’, with a manifesto that explains its features, what should be considered by those who bring science to these personal stories. It is something that interests me and, I think, is seen more and more in the cinema. Thanks to the recent pandemic, we can appreciate that we are science and that is my poetics, my impulse to fiction, my way of approaching the world”.
CT
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