How many times is the same story repeated in a country where impunity prevails and the figures on forced disappearances, kidnappings, femicides, overflow the registration capacity? What can you expect from a law enforcement system that has no qualms about being cavalier or, worse yet, defensive?
All the narrative tension of the feature film La Civil, the first fiction by the Romanian director Teodora Mihai, falls on the actress Arcelia Ramírez, with an impeccable work that from fiction offers a window to the mental plane that only a mother who loses her daughter can experience in the clutches of organized crime.
Cielo is the name of the protagonist of this film of just over two hours. Her life turns upside down at the moment when two doubtfully adult henchmen notify her about the kidnapping of her daughter Laura and the hundreds of thousands of pesos that she must pay for her release.
Cielo tries to beat time, submit to structural machismo and the desistance attempts of her ex-husband and Laura’s father. He has and is going to get the blackmail money, but Laura does not appear, the counterpart’s promise is not kept, and Cielo then renounces his emotions, discouragement and collapse; it seems that she gives up herself to give herself in a search among vacant lots, among corpses, in the face of high caliber weapons and among suspiciously dark justice men. This mother will not stop searching for her until she finds those responsible for the disappearance of her daughter. It is the story of thousands of mothers in our country.
Premiere five years after the murder
The character of Cielo is inspired by the case of the Tamaulipas activist Miriam Rodríguez, who, like Cielo in the film and like so many women robbed of their peace of mind, has no choice but to bite the bullet to confront a rogue system of feet to the head, even if it puts his life at risk. Miriam was murdered a few steps from her house in Tamaulipas on May 10, 2017, five years ago.
For her work in La Civil, it is well known, Arcelia Ramírez received prolonged palms at the 2021 edition of the Cannes Festival. And finally, a year after its debut on the big screen on the other side of the Atlantic, the film will be released on May 19 in 200 theaters in the country. Prior to the premiere, director Teodora Mihai and actors Arcelia Ramírez and Álvaro Guerrero speak with El Economista.
“I worked on the subject for seven years since the investigation and it is shocking to see that it continues to be as or more current than before. I can’t say more than that,” declares the notoriously afflicted filmmaker.
The script was worked on four hands between Mihai and the Tamaulipas writer Habacuc Antonio de Rosario. The goal, the Romanian filmmaker shares, was to treat the text subtly, to walk the thin narrative thread without falling into the well of apology for violence or re-victimization.
“We take great care to give the necessary nuances and not pigeonhole the characters into black and white. There is good in evil and there is evil in good, and that is what humanizes and, I think, makes the film feel very real, but without being moralistic. The point is not to point fingers at anyone, because unfortunately I don’t have the answers, I just have a movie with a lot of questions”, she adds.
character building
“Teodora and I saw each other for almost a month and a half, every day, to do table work on the script, to build each moment, each change of intention of the character, to assimilate how Cielo normally lives this circle of violence by that enters and from which there is no way to get out unscathed,” says Arcelia Ramírez.
“In each scene there was a complex dramatic fabric and when it was our turn to shoot and I had not given the nuance, she (the director) was there to let me know and for us to try again as we had agreed. The management work was thorough and precise. So it was paradoxically a delight to make this film”, shares the actress.
The film was shot in 2020, between the most rigorous confinements, prior to the massification of vaccines. All the scenes fell on Arcelia and she decided to isolate herself as much as she could to avoid any risk of contagion. “If she made me sick, filming had to be stopped, so I practically ate, had breakfast and dinner in my room to have less risk of getting sick.”
Finally, the actor Álvaro Guerrero points out that “what is intended with the film is to present a problem in such a way that it is not an offense for those who are suffering. It would be very easy to use it as a political flag to take it to one side or the other, but what we want is to put on the table a bad present from a long time ago, about which the media did not say anything and until now the sewer is being opened. We cannot single out someone specifically, we must question each other.”
The Civilian
- Direction: Teodora Mihai
- Screenplay: Teodora Mihai, Habacuc Antonio de Rosario
- Cast: Arcelia Ramírez, Álvaro Guerrero, Jorge A. Jiménez, Aylén Muzo, Juan Daniel García Treviño, Alessandra Goñi Bucio
- Duration: 2 hours 20 minutes
- Awards:
- Courage Award – Cannes Film Festival
- Political Film Award – Hamburg Film Festival
- Best Performance – Arcelia Ramírez – Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival