Today I had the opportunity to speak with Amat Escalante, the award-winning Mexican filmmaker. Although he was born in Barcelona and spent some years in the United States, Mexico has always been his home. When I asked him why he made Heli, he said he wanted to tell the story of the people of Guanajuato, the central Mexican state in which he lives. He wanted to tell the story of normal people whose lives collapse because of the violence rampant in the country. He didn’t want to follow the cash-cow trend of Hollywood borderland films littered with the bang-bang moments of drug trade shootouts. Instead, Escalante hoped to capture the lives of an unassuming family, three generations living under one roof, where the men walk for miles before dawn to begin work at the local General Motors car plant because they have no real education.

Escalante himself dropped out of school at fifteen to become a filmmaker. He expressed how he originally intended to make documentaries but soon discovered he didn’t have the personality for it. He spent two years in Austin, Texas, where he saw the films of Fassbinder, Tarkovsky, and Bresson every Tuesday evening as part of the Austin Film Society: “it was a really important moment for me” he says.

His films are known for their abrupt moments of bloody violence. In his second feature, Los Bastardos, which follows the lives of two undocumented labourers in California, a woman’s face is blown off by a boy with a shotgun. Some critics at Cannes last year were abhorred by similar moments in Heli, calling them “gratuitous”. Dismayed that they had missed the true intentions of his film, the young director called them cowards. Nevertheless, Heli went on to win Escalante the Best Director award at the festival – the third Mexican to do so in the last seven years. Its striking realism, in contrast to Baz Lurhmann’s cotton candy coated Great Gatsby which premiered just before, rang true for the judging committee headed by Steven Spielberg.

In the time that has elapsed since Cannes, Escalante tells me that more people appreciate the violence as a necessary detail to depicting Mexico as it truly is. Particularly, Mexicans home and away have identified with its sincere portrayal of what many families have gone through. It is for such reasons that Heli was selected as Mexico’s entry into the Academy Awards this year.

He laughs when I ask him if he feels it a personal mission to expose civil conflicts and corruption in Mexican society. He says that his creative process always begins with an image, not a cause. In this instance it is that of a seventeen-year-old boy looking for his father in the desert. However, he does, then, feel a responsibility in being truthful in his portrayal.

In the film, Heli’s twelve-year-old sister, Estela, plans to elope with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Beto. Guanajuato is the most religious state in Mexico, he says. So much so that abortion remains illegal and as a consequence countless girls like Estela are having children. The mother whose baby was cast as Heli’s daughter in the film was constantly on set to supervise. She was fourteen years old.

As the interview draws to an end I ask him what he plans to do next. He told me he loves film genres like slashers and westerns, and he loves Sergio Leone. He says he plans to start shooting “something” next year, except he doesn’t know what that “something” is yet. But whatever it is, he said, it’s going to surprise us all.

Amat Escalante will be at the Arts Picturehouse Cambridge this Saturday (24 May) for a Director Q&A and screening of his new film Heli. You can read Varsity's review here.