A Wolfpack Called Ernesto
The bleak prospects for children in Mexico are highlighted in Everardo González’s brilliantly original documentary.
Although Everardo González happened to be born in America, Mexico is the central focus for this well-established documentarian filmmaker who in addition to his work for television has been making feature films for some twenty years. Nevertheless, this is the first time that his work has come my way so I can't say whether or not the marked originality of A Wolfpack Called Ernesto will have taken his devotees by surprise. As a film centred on gang violence in Mexico City and on its impact on young people there, the subject matter is entirely in keeping with González’s previous work and might well have yielded a documentary of a standard kind. Yet in the event what we have here is quite unlike any other documentary that I have ever seen.
Originality in documentaries can often be quirky and self-serving, but what González does here is based on his realisation that so very many young people living in the city and without a wealthy background to support them are subject to exactly the same pressures. Consequently, to tell their stories is to tell one story and to convey how their lives are likely to develop and to do so in the most weighty way possible it is better to focus on those common factors rather than to take a handful of individual tales each with their own particular background details. This realisation has led to a film in which the main youngsters featured are in effect heard rather than seen. The unnamed youths, for the most part males, are always photographed from behind, the most favoured shots being close-ups of the head (the backs of their necks are sufficiently central to convey a sense of human vulnerability). Protected by the anonymity resulting from their faces being off-limits, these individuals are free to speak honestly and without fear about their past history, their current situation and their limited future.
It might be expected that this visual limitation would render A Wolfpack Called Ernesto uncinematic and a work more suited to radio regardless of both the variety one finds in background shots and the way in which at least a couple of sequences are extended to represent part of a specific narrative that is unfolding. But any such expectations prove to be unfounded because Gonzalez’s film does rely on its visuals to take us into the world of those featured. Part of this concentrated immersion stems from the huge attention he has paid to sound and, if natural sounds are part of that, so too is the music heard whether it be part of the social background or present to communicate the drama of what we are learning. Even moments when the screen is black contribute: they do so by helping to break up the comments as the film moves from one individual to another or by providing a brief pause or by becoming an occasion when a newcomer is introduced with the voice heard just before the accompanying visuals begin.
Although the title is not explained in the film, it is undoubtedly intended as an indication that all of those featured share so much in common that they are akin to a single person who could be called Ernesto. However different the details we hear, the comments follow a pattern, one that denotes a common path. Even before they reach their teenage years these kids are aware of the places where drugs are dealt. Friendships can bring a warmth lacking at home but often lead to membership of gangs. Cartels make use of youngsters needing money and then enslave them. Before long guns become a focal point acquired either as a possession or as something to sell on (one of the female contributors regards them as necessary to protect herself and her children but also sees them as pretty things). Later still involvement with guns can turn boys into killers either through being employed for that purpose or as a consequence of being caught up in gang rivalry.
Presented in this unusual way, A Wolfpack Called Ernesto is a slow burn of a movie. Some viewers might find its mode tiresome but, if you yield to it, it proves to be a telling way of showing the extent to which the seemingly inescapable dangers in this society are now so widespread. At the same time the film communicates how from the viewpoint of these youths what we see as a downward spiral can be regarded as its opposite, a way in which a youngster can persuade himself that the course he has taken is one which allows him to believe that he is not a victim anymore. Yet what rings true for the viewer is the statement at the film’s conclusion that the fate of an armed young man is to die. One understands why this film had to be made when one reads a statement contained in the publicity for it: “350,000 people have been killed in Mexico in the last fifteen years by armed perpetrators, 30,000 of them under eighteen”.
Original title: Una jauría Ilamada Ernesto.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Dir Everardo González, Pro Roberto Garza and Inna Payán, Screenplay Óscar Balderas, Daniela Rea and Everardo González, Ph María Secco, Ed Paloma López Carrillo, Music Haxah, Konk Reyes and Andrés Sánchez Maher.
Animal de Luz Films/N+ Docs/Films Boutique/Artegios/Alsea/Bord Cadre Films-Sovereign Films.
78 mins. Switzerland/France/Mexico. 2023. UK Rel: 23 February 2024. Cert. 15.
