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Mexico / All works

Feature film

Excess Baggage

El bulto

Gabriel Retes · 1992

Synopsis

Lauro, a left-wing press photographer in Mexico City, is beaten senseless by the Halcones, a paramilitary group, during the student demonstration of 10 June 1971, and falls into a coma. He wakes up twenty years later, in 1991. His wife has made a new life, his children Sonia and Daniel are adults and see him as a burden, the Communist Party has disappeared and his former revolutionary comrades have entered the service of the government.

Context

The director plays the role of Lauro and casts his mother Lucila Balzaretti, his children Gabriela and Juan Claudio Retes and Lourdes Elizarrarás, alongside Héctor Bonilla and José Alonso. The film is produced on a small budget by the Río Mixcoac cooperative, which he founded, and wins the fourth Mexico City film competition, run by the union and the Mexican Film Institute. Released on 28 August 1992, it holds the bill in cinemas that mostly showed American films, then finds its audience on video.

Who it is for

One hour fifty-four minutes, between farce and melodrama, in Spanish; the film is shown on the public platform Nuestro Cine.

Prizes and reception

Ariel for Best Editing for Saúl Aupart; fifty-second in the ranking of the hundred best Mexican films published by the magazine Somos in July 1994.

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