A portrait of a cemetery in Mexico, being quickly filled by the young victim's of Mexico's drug wars on both the police and gangster side.
Beautifully shot, and told completely observationally (there are a few lines of narration from the night watchman of the cemetery, the titular figure). Mostly there are just the images, and the endless, horrific news reports on radio and TV of more and more killings.
It took me a while to settle into this. At first its seeming lack of focus or 'plot' making it slow going. But there was a powerful accumulative effect, so by the end it's a deeply sad and disturbing piece about the loss of a generation, and a country caught in what amounts to a civil war. As we see a woman (wife?) of a slain policeman return day after day to wash his elaborate tomb, or hear the screams of loss from a mother in the distance as we watch workmen create more and more concrete graves we are taken inside a desperate way of life that is almost unimaginable to those of us lucky enough to live safe, middle-class lives.
Beautifully shot, and told completely observationally (there are a few lines of narration from the night watchman of the cemetery, the titular figure). Mostly there are just the images, and the endless, horrific news reports on radio and TV of more and more killings.
It took me a while to settle into this. At first its seeming lack of focus or 'plot' making it slow going. But there was a powerful accumulative effect, so by the end it's a deeply sad and disturbing piece about the loss of a generation, and a country caught in what amounts to a civil war. As we see a woman (wife?) of a slain policeman return day after day to wash his elaborate tomb, or hear the screams of loss from a mother in the distance as we watch workmen create more and more concrete graves we are taken inside a desperate way of life that is almost unimaginable to those of us lucky enough to live safe, middle-class lives.
