Photo © The Forge
Juan Jesús Varela in Sujo (2024)
Juan Jesús Varela in Sujo (2024)
Four-year-old Sujo is told by his aunt to hide beneath the kitchen table and keep still. The men who have just killed his father, Josue, are also looking for him. The boy understands none of this. All he knows is that Josue was a loving dad who walked him to school in the morning, saying, “Be a nice boy, pay attention to your teachers.” Sure, Sujo was once kept in a locked car as his father went about his mysterious business, but how could a four-year-old understand that dad was a killer for a drug cartel?
Soju, winner of the World Cinematic Drama Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, opens this year’s Latin American Film Series at UWM. The series runs April 3-10 and features documentaries and comedies as well as dramas from several nations. All films will be shown with English subtitles and screened at the UWM Union Cinema.
Written and directed by Mexican filmmakers Astrid Roundero and Fernanda Valadez, Sujo turns around a cycle of violence in which killing leads to more killing. Vengeance is expected. Why does the cartel boss want to kill the boy? “He’ll grow up to give me trouble,” he tells Sujo’s aunt Nemesia. But for whatever reason, blood ties or passing sentiment, the boss relents. “I don’t want him in town,” he tells Nemesia.
Flash forward 10 years. Sujo is an adolescent reared by his aunt in rural isolation with the company of boys his age, Jai and Jeremy—the latter with “an American name” from his parents’ aborted plan to immigrate to the U.S. Trouble will follow the boys as it followed their elders. Sujo’s cinematography shifts from claustrophobic compositions of entrapment to the alure of long horizons and open spaces. Many of the best moments have the hallucinatory essence of a disturbing, recurring dream.
As in past years, the 2025 Latin American Film Series travels widely between nations and subjects. The Two Mariettes by U.S.-born, Argentine-based director Poli Martinez Kaplun documents a 90-year-old woman who finally came out—as Jewish. Her family fled Paris ahead of the advancing German army in 1940 and made their way to Buenos Aires a year later, determined to close the past and assimilate into the present. The documentary’s subject, Mariette Diamant, was “shocked” to learn of her ancestry when she was 16, and because of the bad social perception in Catholic Argentina of Jews as greedy Christ killers, worked assiduously to maintain the family secret even from her own children.
Sujo screens 7 p.m. Thursday, April 3 and The Two Mariettes at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 9. For more information, visit https://uwm.edu/clacs/public-engagement/film-series/.
