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Voy a Explotar

Gerardo Naranjo

Mexico

2008, Colour, 106 min

30 Jun 2010 - 22:00

Open-Air Amphitheatre

When we discover that Naranjo was himself a young rebel in Salamanca, the city where he was born, and that he founded a university film club called Zero de Comportamento (Zero for Conduct), the title of a short film by Jean Vigo about rebelliousness, we are not surprised to find that this film is also about young rebels. 

Some directors are like this – capable of appropriating the most disparate cinematic genres and using these to make a film that afterwards it becomes obvious that only they themselves could have made! With the Mexican filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo and this film of his from 2008, we can confirm what he knows about the history of cinema – he has seen everything, he spends days on end watching DVDs, and, when he was in Lisbon, he spent his days at the Cinemateca (Portuguese Film Institute) watching Portuguese films – just as he knows the techniques of melodrama, Nouvelle Vague, German cinema from the 1970s, adventure films, Westerns, etc... And when he brings some of these techniques into his own films, it all makes perfect sense. Voy a explotar is an action film, about the adventures of two young Mexicans – Roman and Maru – who want to bring about a revolution in their lives, but who don’t want to go anywhere. It is a film that is full of close-ups, combined with some fast sequences, with a camera that pursues every gesture of the characters, invading the inside of books, revolvers, beds or the tent erected on the roof of a rich villa in Mexico City, where the adventurous couple hide out. Still emerging from adolescence, but already disillusioned about their future, Roman and Maru provide the perfect confirmation that all dreams can be lived out, but that every dream has a price. Voy a Explotar is one of the most important films in the new Mexican cinema.