LOCARNO — Mexico City-based Interior 13, a lynchpin of Mexico’s left-of-field art-house scene both as a production and distribution house, is set to produce “I Promise Anarchy,” Julio Hernandez Cordon’s follow-up to Locarno international competition player “Dust.”
A step-up in scale and move towards a more open art-house style from Cordon who broke through with 2008’s multi-prized “Gasolina, “Anarchy” turns on two young skate boarders in Mexico City, one from a middle-class family, the other from a humble barrio, who are lovers. To finance their lifestyle, they sell their own blood. The film ends in Texas.
Hernandez is currently completing the screenplay. Interior 13 aims to tap money from Foprocine, Mexico’s more art-house-skewed public film fund, Interior 13 founder Sandra Gomez said at Locarno, which she is attending with company partner Maximiliano Cruz.
“Anarchy” is scheduled to go into production mid-2014.
It will be co-produced by Burning Blue in Bogota.
Burning Blue’s credits include Ciro Guerra’s Cannes 2009 Un Certain Regard player “The Wind Journeys,” Oscar Ruiz Navia’s Fipresci Berlin Forum winner “Crab Trap,” and Juan Andres Arango’s “La Playa DC,” seen in Cannes Un Certain Regard last year.
Made on low budgets without stars and set in and portraying key issues in his native Guatemala – disaffected youth, the legacy of civil conflict – Hernandez Cordon’s movies have proved festival hits from the get-go: “Gasolina” won San Sebastian’s Films in Progress pix-in-post competition in 2007 and its Horizontes Latinos sidebar a year later. “Marimbas From Hell,” his sophomore outing, topped 2010’s Morelia.
“’I Promise Anarchy’ is a bigger, much more ambitious film for Julio Hernandez,” Gomez said.
“But it still plays with many of the elements which his previous films have turned on: Youth culture, adolescents who confront authority, social issues,” she added.
Launched in 2008, Interior 13 distributes 10-15 movies a year in Mexico, mainly left-of-field Latin American and international titles. It has released all the movies from Mexico’s Yulene Olaizola (“Artificial Paradises”) and Nicolas Pereda (“Summer of Goliath”), Brazilian Kleber Mendonca Filho’s “Neighboring Sounds,” “Alps,” from Yorgos Lanthimos, like Pereda a Locarno jury member, and Locarno 2012 competition entry “Leviathan.”
Distributing art films outside Mexico City is a tough call but, said Gomez, Interior 13 has built up its own network of screens, both at multiplexes and cultural centers. Over a year, a Pereda movie could play maybe 10 locations in Mexico, she added.
Gomez is also the director of Riviera Maya Festival’s industry section Riviera Lab; Cruz programs the Mexican festival.
