“TIJUANA MAKES ME HAPPY”
Winner of the 2007 Slamdance Grand Prize for Best Narrative Feature, Dylan Verrechia‘s look across the border is as much reality as it is fiction. Set in Tijuana, the film follows 14-year-old Indio (Pablo Tendilla Ortiz) as he journeys to become a man. I love the film’s synopsis on its MySpace page, so I’ll just quote directly.
“Every man remembers how hard it is being 14 years old: Your voice is cracking, your hormones are raging, school is boring, the girl you love is a young prostitute who won’t go out with you because you don’t have enough cash so you start smuggling drugs across the border in order to save enough money to buy a rooster so you can enter a cockfight and win her love. It’s a tale as old as time itself.”
Instead of making a preachy socially conscience film about the infamous border town and its impoverished residents, Verrechia decides instead to express these issues in a more lighthearted way. But using non-actors (Tijuana redisents) and handheld shooting (the film can easily be mistaken for a documentary in some places), it gives a legitimacy to what’s taking place rather than a traditional means of narrative storytelling, which could have made it campy. That’s some of the fun to the film, you don’t know what’s staged and what’s real.
Outside of its realistic look of Tijuana, the film is really a father/son tale, as Jhonny (Pablo Tendilla Rocha, Ortiz’s real father) struggles to raise Indio by himself while attempting to live his own life. Proving family is a universal theme, regardless what side of the border you’re on.
The film hits streets this week through Phoenix Entertainment for $19.99.
