Fauna

  • A man and a woman look in each other's eyes

Q&A with Director Nicolás Pereda after the screening on Friday, March 11!

“Pereda teases with and deconstructs the fictions typically associated with contemporary Mexican culture in a lean 70-minute running time that abounds in droll humor and bold conceptual play” – The New York Times

“True to [filmmaker Nicolás Pereda’s] ironic and scathing style” – La Jornada

“Slowly reveals itself as a clever study in performance and identity that mines its cringe comedy to poke fun at contemporary narconovelas and their grip on that country’s cultural imagination” – Variety

“Lyrical, haunting and at times extraordinarily funny” – Globe and Mail

“With its beautiful wide shots of small-town Mexico, Pereda’s Fauna cunningly mixes witty comedy with neo-noir suspense for a smart angle on the country’s ongoing drug war”  – Roger Ebert


Winner: Best Latin American Film, Cinema Tropical Awards

Winner: Best Direction of a Mexican Fiction Film at the Morelia International Film Festival


Nicolás Pereda’s ninth feature, and certainly one of his best, Fauna is a sly, deceptively smart, and comedic take on how violence in Mexico has infiltrated popular imagination.

The bifurcated story — which begins, tellingly, through the windshield of a car — uses a simple premise and Pereda’s regular troupe of talented actors to spin an inventive tale about family dysfunction, which echoes some of the country’s pathologies. When estranged siblings Luisa (Luisa Pardo) and Gabino (Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez) visit their parents in an eerily deserted mining town in the north of Mexico, the presence of Luisa’s affable actor boyfriend, Paco (Francisco Barreiro), gives rise to awkward scenarios. Their father’s seeming ambivalence toward his children is suddenly transformed by his fixation on Paco’s role in a famous narco-themed television series. Hilarious, bittersweet incidents, replete with simmering tension — underscored by a nuanced and acerbic critique of masculinity and the glorification of violence in mainstream media — become nested in a parallel reality fuelled by Gabino’s active imagination and need for escape. This mordant inset reshuffles the players in a sun-soaked, noir-tinged story of organized crime (including a detective and a femme fatale, of course), an unlikely send-up of the perceived glamour of narco fiction.

Presented by RoxCine. Co-presented by Cinema TropicalThe Mexican Museum and SF Latino Film Festival

Runtime
1h 10m
Year
2020
Director
Nicolás Pereda
Format
2D Digital
Country
Mexico, Canada
Language
Spanish with English subtitles
Categories
  • Assisted Listening