Fauna

Luisa and Gabino travel to a remote mining town in northern Mexico to visit their parents, accompanied by Luisa’s boyfriend Paco, an actor with a minor role in a popular narco television series. Their father, otherwise largely indifferent to his guests, is suddenly fascinated: can Paco perform a scene for him? From this awkward request, Fauna sets off on an increasingly unpredictable course, as familial tensions and deadpan comedy give way to a parallel tale of detectives, disappearances and organised crime. At once playful and disquieting, Fauna asks what happens when representations of violence become so pervasive that they begin to determine how reality is understood.

More explicitly political in its form, Fauna is followed by the short essay film Flora, which traces connections between the representation of narcoculture, the mining landscape in which the films were made and the structures of power and extraction underpinning both – offering a revealing counterpoint to the feature’s more oblique provocations.

Fauna, dir. Nicolás Pereda, Mexico / Canda 2020, Spanish with English subtitles, 70 min