Don’t see a movie by Mexican auteur Michel Franco expecting to feel joy, nostalgia or solace in troubled times.
“I’m not interested in comfort cinema, in making the audience feel better. I like challenging the audience,” Franco told the Tribeca Festival Lisboa during a press conference on Friday.
His most recent films include Memory, which starred Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard as broken people fumbling for connection, and Dreams, where Mexican ballet dancer Isaac Hernández co-stars alongside Chastain as an undocumented immigrant who pins his odds-against bid for permanency in the U.S. on his relationship with a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist.
“I’m more attracted to people with troubles, to broken people, because that’s reality. That’s what most of us are. This aspirational thing where directors put someone on screen that’s ideal, I look for the opposite. I look for someone that’s incomplete, someone troubled, because that’s what we really are,” Franco said while in Lisbon to screen Dreams at Tribeca Festival Lisboa.
As a Mexican director, Franco said he’s attuned to the plight of immigrants worldwide. “This film is relevant. Many people tell me it’s timely. Well, it’s been the same for decades,” Franco said of Dreams, where immigrants are portrayed as sophisticated human beings, not “illegals” or ready scapegoats for grasping politicians.
“It applies to Europe, with so many people coming from Africa, from many places, simply for their lives. And politicians often use them as a way of explaining why things are going in a wrong direction, instead of taking responsibility for whatever goes wrong, or simply to raise fear. It’s pure fascism,” he added.
Among Franco’s other movies about worlds in turmoil is New Order, the 2020 Spanish language drama that portrayed a coup d’état in which the wealthy ruling class is replaced by a militarized regime, and which bowed in Venice.
“That film was extremely hard to make, to imagine, to write, to shoot as well. It had 3,000 extras and it’s about the breakdown of the country. And then it was a controversial film, which is exactly what I was expecting when I decided to do it,” Franco recalled.
“But mostly what I liked about it was in almost every country, people told me this could happen here, for different reasons,” he added, as Franco cited France’s yellow vest protest movement and South Korea’s thwarted martial law crisis as instances of political turmoil around the world.
The Mexican director said he too wants to be challenged when watching movies at the cinema. “I like being asked questions about where the world is going, how our society is functioning or failing, and that’s what New Order did,” he said.
Tribeca Festival Lisboa continues through to Nov. 1.
