Amat Escalante On ‘Heli,’ Mexican Drugs Lords, Cannes [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

Mexican director Amat Escalante‘s film Heli earned him the top directing prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. The movie traces the life of Heli (Armando Espitia), who lives in a small town with his family where money is tight. Heli and his father work in a car factory, while his wife adjusts to her new life as a mother. Then, Heli’s sister Estela (Andrea Vergara) lets her dubious boyfriend Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios) hide drugs in the water tank of their roof. From there, Heli’s life takes a tailspin. “This is what movies are for — to see things, no?” Escalante told uInterview. “So with that ideal, I go to the extreme to try and show as much as I can in that violence anyway.”

Escalante wanted to delve deeper than superficial news accounts to show the true costs of the war on drugs. “There is not much deepness in [the media], because also there is a lot of danger in the press, if they start to go in deep on the situation,” Escalante told uInterview.