Amat Escalante's Heli--my take different from the reviewers'

[raquelita]

So far at the Film Festival I've seen a film where country people retell what they know about a hanging a hundred years ago, one about a young woman sentenced to prison for killing her mother (maybe she did, maybe she didn't), a surprisingly upbeat film about Colombian teenagers making the best of city life when their family breaks apart, a lengthy, depressing film about the failure of foreign aid in Haiti, a short documentary where women talk of their degradation of women in the Dem Republic of Congo, I could go on . . . Some of these I wandered into, some I chose but, although some might, I do not consider Escalante's film exploitational or divorced from important Mexican realities that anyone reading a newspaper is exposed to. If the critics want to ignore the less sensational parts of the movie, well that kind of narrow visioin permeates much coverage about Mexico. (Heli (2013) is on imdb - that's how I found the reviews.)