Tale of Mexican Drug Violence Rattles Cannes 2013 Jill Lawless - Associated Press
go to original May 16, 2013

HELI (CineVistaBlog)

CANNES, France - The Cannes Film Festival has had its first shock to the system, in the shape of Mexican director Amat Escalante's unsparingly violent drug war drama "Heli."

The story of the devastation wreaked by narco-violence on an ordinary Mexican family, the movie paints such a bleak picture that one journalist told its director Thursday that she had cancelled a planned trip to the country after seeing it.

Escalante said that wasn't the reaction he was hoping for.

"It's not an anti-tourism movie for Mexico at all," he told reporters in Cannes, where "Heli" is one of 20 films competing for the top prize, the Palme d'Or. "It's a drama that is quite extreme because I think it's even worse, the reality in Mexico — but not the everyday reality.

"It's a great country, a beautiful country that has this virus that invades certain parts, and many people are suffering," said 34-year-old Escalante, both the youngest director and the only Latin American in the main Cannes competition.

Read the rest at SFGate

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