‘Sujo’: Sundance Review

Dirs/scr: Astrid Rondero, Fernanda Valadez. Mexico, USA, France. 2024. 125mins

A cartel member is executed by rival gang members, in a small town in the state of Michoacan, Western Mexico. He leaves behind him an orphaned four-year-old son, Sujo, who is saved from the same fate as his father by the intervention of his aunt. But as the boy approaches adulthood, he must decide between his father’s legacy and an alternative self-determined destiny. This is a satisfying and impressively acted drama from Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, the filmmaking team behind the 2020 Sundance Audience Award and Special Jury Award-winning picture Identifying Features.

 A satisfying and impressively acted drama

At the forefront of a particularly rich current crop of female filmmaking talent from Mexico, Rondero and Valadez have been collaborating closely for over fifteen years, producing several short films and two previous features, Identifying Features (which in addition to its Sundance awards, also won prizes at San Sebastian, Zurich, Thessaloniki and a Gotham Award for Best International Film) and The Darkest Days Of Us (2017). This latest film could be viewed as a companion piece to Identifying Features, in that both deal with the human cost of the epidemic levels of cartel violence in present-day Mexico.

But while that film looked at the collateral damage suffered by people who are not involved in the drug trade, Sujo explores the plight of a boy for whom cartel membership is written into his DNA (and later tattooed onto his chest). There are a few moments of lagging pace and a couple of unanswered questions about the inner workings of cartel politics but, for the most part, this is a satisfying saga that should match Identifying Features’ warm reception on the festival circuit and elsewhere.

The picture is divided into a four-chapter structure, with a striking bookending sequence, featuring a fractious runaway stallion, that gives us a glimpse into another aspect of Sujo’s birthright. The first chapter, dedicated to Sujo’s father Josue ‘the Eighth’, is a predominantly child’s eye view of the kind of maelstrom of violence that a four-year-old struggles to comprehend. But Sujo, hidden under the table of a family friend, understands enough to keep quiet when a man with a gun comes looking for him.

His aunt Nemesia (Yadira Pérez), who is gifted with second sight and knows all too well what fate awaits the child if the man gets hold of him, pleads for his life and is granted stewardship of the boy – on the condition that he is never seen in town. Thus begins Sujo’s isolated childhood: forbidden from attending school, he lives in a tumbledown shack surrounded by goats and chickens, and steeped in Nemesia’s folklore and mysticism. Music is used sparsely in the film, but the sound design captures the atmospheric nocturnal melodies of the mountain country.

Despite his isolation, Sujo (played as a teen and young adult by the terrific Juan Jesús Varela) has two friends his own age, brothers Jeremy (Jairo Hernández Ramírez) and Jai (Alexis Jassiel Varela). And it’s through them that the cartel starts to exert its inexorable pull once Sujo is old enough to be of use as a courier. It’s also through the boys that the deadly consequences of working for a cartel make themselves clear once again. Acting on one of her premonitions, Nemesia sends Sujo away on a bus to Mexico City, with orders never to return.

It is a tough life, but Sujo views the city, handsomely captured by Ximena Amann’s camera, as a world of new possibilities. The meagre but honest living that the boy carves out for himself permits him, gradually, to dream of something better – an education, with the support of literature lecturer Susan (Sandra Lorenzano). But the cartel has made its mark on Sujo. And, like the gang tattoo on his chest, this is not easy to erase.