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Some images have become metonymic by nature, reflecting the political problems of today with little to no context needed. Such a shot opens Michel Franco’s newest offering, Dreams, and it is one of a huge truck abandoned next to a railway: illegal border-crossing. It rattles and shakes with the screams of people locked inside, clamoring for help; one already anticipates the dire condition the fugitives all are in once the police break open the back door. One of those “illegals” manages to escape amidst the chaos: a youngish, strong-looking man (Isaác Hernández) whose determination is made clear by every step he takes on that desolate road. We don’t know who he is, but he surely knows where he’s going, and there’s a fierceness to him that overpowers the pain he’s obviously in.

After hitchhiking to San Francisco, he breaks into the lavish house of Jennifer McCarthy...

The Netflix drama series Pact of Silence features a cast of established actors who bring to life a number of compelling characters. In this fast-paced telenovela, Brenda Ray was abandoned as a baby by four private school students. After becoming a wealthy social media influencer, she decides to bring vengeance against the four women responsible for her traumas and determine which one is her mother. The show was released in October 2023, and joins other great Spanish language shows on Netflix that have gained a massive audience on the streaming site.

Like many great telenovelas, Pact of Silence includes twists and turns that keep viewers on the edge of their seats. The show keeps the question of Brenda's mother going until it has no choice but to reveal her identity. Moreover, every character is well-developed and plays a role in the plot. Multiple fantastic telenovela actresses and actors help bring the...

Obsessively examining crisis in terms of its navigation and interiority, the films of Mexican director Michel Franco confront common human behavior amidst extraordinary events. In the face of his characters’ often truly confounding decisions, Franco’s interest in the indistinct, in the prevarications of men and women in conflict, and in the disparate realities posed by wealth and class divisions, affords him a distinct place in the contemporary cinema. Since his 2009 debut Daniel & Ana, the preoccupations of Franco’s output appear consistent, even as they may at times suggest a cloying violence, which in all its sundry forms, emerges as […]

The post “A Movie Should Only be Understood by Watching It”: Michel Franco on His Tim Roth-Starring Psychological Drama, Sundown first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Obsessively examining crisis in terms of its navigation and interiority, the films of Mexican director Michel Franco confront common human behavior amidst extraordinary events. In the face of his characters’ often truly confounding decisions, Franco’s interest in the indistinct, in the prevarications of men and women in conflict, and in the disparate realities posed by wealth and class divisions, affords him a distinct place in the contemporary cinema. Since his 2009 debut Daniel & Ana, the preoccupations of Franco’s output appear consistent, even as they may at times suggest a cloying violence, which in all its sundry forms, emerges as […]

The post “A Movie Should Only be Understood by Watching It”: Michel Franco on His Tim Roth-Starring Psychological Drama, Sundown first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Michel Franco’s “New Order” went off like a bomb at the Venice Film Festival in the summer of 2020. This dystopian social-uprising thriller that erupts with almost Hieronymus Boschian levels of chaos pits the lower Mexican class against the super One Percent as the under-served and under-represented begin picking off the wealthy. And it all unfolds in explicitly violent, free-for-all fashion from the Mexican director of films like sibling incest drama “Daniel and Ana,” bullying nightmare “After Lucia,” and the end-of-life caregiver drama “Chronic,” starring Tim Roth.

But the chances of “New Order” getting a wide release quickly sank when backlash began to emerge in Mexico in response to the trailer. Critics were quick to point out perceived racial stereotypes in the film, including that the uprisers were more dark-skinned than the lighter-skinned One Percent, and that the Black Lives Matter-inspired protesters in the film were glibly portrayed as one-note,...

This excerpt is from The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema (2021), by Jason Wood. It was conducted before the premiere of Franco's latest film, New Order (2020).As a director, screenwriter and producer, Michel Franco is a prolific figure in Mexican cinema. Daniel & Ana (2009), Franco’s debut feature as director, premiered at Cannes and established him as a film-maker with a forensic eye for detail and character. Franco is also incredibly attuned to contemporary issues in Mexican society, in this instance the rise of underground pornography. The winner of the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes, After Lucia (2012) continues the director’s interest in fractured family lives and how technology can act as a powerful and poisonous tool. A los ojos (2014), a collaboration with Franco’s sister Victoria, adopts a documentary aesthetic to explore the ends to which a parent will go to protect their child, whilst also examining how little...

As Deadline continues to expand its footprint internationally, we launch International Critics Line as a way to incorporate regular reviews of the fine local-language films being made outside of America. These films always have served as a seed bed to break new directors and stars in Hollywood, and we intend to spend more time with them. Major awards-season and festival-launch films now will have a dedicated landing place on Deadline, along with some unsung gems that deserve a close look by our readers and films that have achieved outsized success on their home turf. We will catch up to some films that played the festivals — such as they were — in the pandemic, as we draw even with new releases. We start with Michel Franco’s Nuevo Orden.

Nuevo Orden (New Order)

Parasite seems like a mere hors d’oeuvre compared with the main course of societal upheaval served up by...

The German sales company unveils exclusive teasers for ‘New Order’, ‘Never Gonna Snow Again’ and ‘Assandira’.

Michael Weber’s The Match Factory is preparing for a very busy Venice Film Festival when it kicks off next week, with four features in official selection.

Michel Franco’s New Order, Malgorzata Szumowska’s Never Gonna Snow Again (co-directed with her regular cinematographer Michal Englert) and Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno are all screening in Competition, while Salvatore Mereu’s Assandira will play out of Competition.

Screen can reveal the exclusive first teasers here for New Order, Never Gonna Snow Again and Assandira. The...

Michel Franco’s “New Order,” a Venice Festival main competition premiere, looks set to mark a huge step-up in scale for Franco and indeed most Latin American movies at large.

It couldn’t be otherwise, Mexican writer-director-producer Franco said at a Sarajevo Film Festival masterclass, hosted Wednesday in the Variety Streaming Room.

Teasing through-lines in a career that has made him one of the most laureled of Latin American directors, Franco also used the masterclass to talk, often with refreshing candor, about the game-changing impact of Tim Roth on his career, directors’ necessity for reassurance, and his need to produce his own movies.

A recipient of a Heart of Sarajevo Award at this year festival, Franco has risen rapidly to prominence after releasing debut feature “Daniel & Ana” in 2009, making intimate and intense movies turning on the victims of trauma – high-school bullying in 2012’s “After Lucia,” the death of an...

Director Michel Hazanavicius and actress Bérénice Bejo, Oscar winner and Oscar nominee respectively for “The Artist,” will present individual Masterclasses at the 26th Sarajevo Film Festival this year. Also delivering Masterclasses are directors Michel Franco and Rithy Panh.

The Masterclasses, which like the rest of the festival are running online via ondemand.sff.ban, are organized in cooperation with Variety, and will be available worldwide via the Variety Streaming Room.

Hazanavicius shot his first feature-length film, “Mes Amis,” in 1999. In 2006, he directed his second feature, “Oss 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies,” and then, three years later, “Oss 17: Lost in Rio.”

In 2011, he made “The Artist,” the silent, black-and-white film starring Bejo and Jean Dujardin, which won five Academy Awards in 2012, including best film, director and actor for Dujardin, while Bejo was an Oscar nominee for supporting actress.

The film premiered at Cannes, as did Hazanavicius’ “The Players” and “Redoubtable.

Most film students learn early on about the Kuleshov effect, which demonstrates how much our interpretation of a neutral image is influenced by whatever image precedes it. The same blank facial expression that’s perceived as “hungry” when it follows a shot of soup, for example, becomes “sad” when it follows a shot of a little girl in a coffin. Chronic, the first English-language feature by Mexican director Michel Franco (Daniel And Ana, After Lucia), employs the Kuleshov effect on a grander scale, freighting a whole lot of ostensibly neutral scenes with tension that’s derived from other, tangentially related scenes. The whole movie is an exercise in ambiguity, designed to engender suspicion about activities that would ordinarily seem utterly benign, and that might very well be utterly benign. When Chronic premiered at Cannes in 2015 (where it unexpectedly won Best Screenplay), one tweet waggishly retitled it Caring Is Creepy ...

Chronic, the 2015 Cannes favorite that won the best screenplay award and was written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco (After Lucia, Daniel and Ana), has finally found its way into U.S. theaters and will bow September 23. The story centers on David (Tim Roth), an in-home nurse who works with terminally ill patients. Efficient and dedicated to his profession, David develops strong, even intimate, relationships with each person he cares for. But outside of his…...

It’s a Tim Roth lead Un Certain Regard jury that awarded Michel Franco with the highest honor of the section. Michel Franco has moved up the Croisette, debuting his Daniel and Ana in the Directors’ Fortnight section in 2009, and the Ucr in 2012 with the equally disturbing After, Lucia. Naturally landing an In Comp spot, Chronic fittingly tapped Roth to play the caretaker protag in the Mexican filmmaker’s fourth feature. As our Nicholas Bell mentioned in his review, “Franco’s bleak predilection for misanthropy shows no signs of waning,” and my guess is that the oft-mentioned comparisons to Haneke made this too jarring of a portrait at the tale end of the fest.

Check back tomorrow for our final grades. Click on the grid below for a larger version.

Official Selection for 2015 line-up completed with extra titles for Competition, Un Certain Regard, Special Screening and Midnight Screening strands.Click here for the full line-up

The 68th Cannes Film Festival has completed its Official Selection. Headlining the additions are two more Competition titles, taking the number of films in the running for the Palme d’Or up to 19.

The first is Chronic by Mexican director Michel Franco, starring Tim Roth and Bitsie Tulloch (Grimm). The film marks Franco’s English-language debut and centres on a depressed nurse practitioner who assists terminally ill patients and tries to reconnect with the family he abandoned. Wild Bunch handles sales

Franco and Roth decided to work together after meeting at Cannes in 2012, where the film-maker’s previous feature After Lucia won Un Certain Regard and Roth served on the jury.

The Mexican filmmaker was also in the running for Cannes’ Golden Camera in 2009 with his debut feature, Daniel and Ana.

The...

Chronic

Director: Michel Franco// Writer: Michel Franco

Provocateur Michel Franco has already built an impressive filmography with two highly divisive films, including his 2009 debut Daniel and Ana and his 2012 sophomore effort After Lucia, which won the Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2012 (where we interviewed the Mexican filmmaker). While his third feature, To the Eyes, co-directed with his sister Victoria, premiered at the Morelia Film Festival and hasn’t navigated into any sort of distribution deal, Franco’s in the midst of completing his fourth film, English language debut Chronic, starring Tim Roth (who was on the Un Certain Regard Jury in 2012). We have very high expectations for the latest Franco flick which tracks a depressed nurse practitioner who assists terminally ill patients and tries to reconnect with the family he abandoned.

Cast: Tim Roth, Bitsie Tulloch, Claire van der Boom

Producers: Michel Franco, Gina Kwon (Day Out of Days), Gabriel Ripstein (600 Millas), Moisés Zonana (After,...

Netflix is adding a Spanish-language soccer comedy to its growing list of original series, making it clear that the company is eyeing the Hispanic market as it continues to grow.

The streaming site has ordered a 13-episode comedy series with a tongue-in-cheek take on the world of soccer — actually, make that fútbol – from director Gaz Alazraki.

The show, which is set to premiere in 2015, stars Mexican actor Luis Gerardo Méndez in a story of a family that feuds for the control of a popular soccer club after its owner dies. The untitled project reunites Alazraki, 36, and Mendez, whose 2013 film Nosotros Los Nobles...

#26. Michel & Vicky Franco’s A los ojos

Gist: Featuring mostly non-actors, A los ojos is a docu-fiction hybrid about a mother (Año bisiesto‘s Monica del Carmen) who works as a social worker in aiding, integrating and rehabilitating children suffering from homelessness in Mexico City, while her son, Omar struggles with life-long problems with his eyesight.

Prediction: 2009 was a huge first step for Franco with Daniel and Ana (Cannes – Directors’ Fortnight ’09) but 2012 proved to be an even bigger year for the filmmaker – winning the top prize in the Un Certain Regard for After Lucia. Representing what could be a huge year for Mexican cinema in Cannes, Franco has been in the works with this project for a while now (he briefly discussed it with us last May), and though the Main Comp would be the logical step up, we think that this might once again play next door in the...

A los ojos (To the Eyes)

Directors/Writers: Vicky and Michel Franco

Producer(s): Lucia Films’ Michel Franco & Moises Zonana

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available

Cast: Monica del Carmen (Michael Rowe’s Año bisiesto)

In my books, his debut Daniel and Ana (Cannes – Directors’ Fortnight ’09) left quite the impression for its unflinching look at an unfathomable, hideous social crime, but it was at the ’12 edition of the Cannes Film Festival where Michel Franco joined the ranks of the Mexico’s top working auteurs (Reygadas, Escalante, Naranjo, Eimbcke and Plá) as several took notice of his skillset and this included Tim Roth and the Un Certain Regard jury who awarded the filmmaker with the top prize of the section. After Lucia, which I describe as a “Haneke film for teens” may posit on the bullying thematic, but here Franco skillfully demonstrates how difficult it is for the healing process to...

After Lucia – Michel Franco

Buzz: I was intensely enthusiastic about the skill levels from this Mexican filmmaker way back in 2009 after having been witness to his nightmarish, gut-wrenching directorial debut in Daniel and Ana (2009′s Directors’ Fortnight), and now Michel Franco is moving up in the festival by taking the logical step up into the Un Certain Regard section. Worth noting: great poster one sheet that further explains how the family dynamic has steered of its natural course.

Gist: Alejandra and her dad Roberto have just moved to town. She is new at school, he has a new job. Starting over is sometimes complicated when you have left so much behind.

"He's best known for his westerns, which traditionally are sagas about how civilization begins, how ruthless and cynical men rip it out of the throat of the wilderness," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "But the end of civilization is what really fascinated Sergio Leone, and the poison within that undoes every would-be paradise. Death and doom and dark hilarity overshadow his films, not just the westerns, but all of them, which are on view this month in a two-week retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive. From his first directorial effort, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961; screens November 13 at 4:30 pm), to the script about the 900-day siege of Leningrad that he left behind when he died in 1989 at the age of 60, Sergio Leone showed us how the world ends — be it by the slow brutal murder of a modern city, or the catastrophic destruction of an ancient one."

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