Director: Alaric S. Rocha
Year: 2025
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Mockumentary
Plot:
Desperate to honor a beloved filmmaker, a documentarian sets out to charter the influence of a massively influential Mexican filmmaker’s career, including a fabled long-lost final project of his, eventually capturing his rise and fall through a series of personal and professional hardships.
Review:
This was an immensely fun and likable feature. There’s a lot to like here, exploring how the early work builds up his fictional career and moves into the industry, discussing a biographical take on the love of moviemaking and desire to get into the affections of his true love that only enhances itself once they finally get old enough to get into making movies. The exploration of their relationship over the course of his film work, how they drift apart into separate sides of the industry, makes for a fun time as we get to explore all these different sides of Mexican cinema with their romantic melodramas, high-end sci-fi/horror films, and luchador films. It’s a great behind-the-scenes look to explore these kinds of genres, as each film is touched on briefly with clips and on-set home videos to help give everything a nostalgic touch.
Where it stumbles is on the main setup, where we get such a fun look at the long-lost final film he made. The idea behind it is quite intriguing, but we get so little info on it, as the running time is more concerned with the other films he made and his early life, so it doesn’t spend as much time as it should on involving the intricacies of the filming, why it was stopped, and the aftermath of filming. This is kept to a minimum so it feels less like that’s an important part of the story at the expense of his other films, making for an odd selling point in conjunction with the wholly bizarre final resolution to everything. Trying to go into the different setups featured here to keep the story going is a bit odd, but it’s the main drawback holding this one down in the end.
Overview: ****/5
An immensely impressive and enjoyable mockumentary feature, there’s quite a lot to like here that manages to keep everything enjoyable enough to offset the minor issues on display. Those with a love for this type of presentation or even the subject matter will have a lot to like here, while those turned off by either of those factors might want to heed caution.
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