“Aquí es alguien que busca a Dios y se le aparecen estos niños salvajes, cómo abre puertas oscuras, desatando demonios”.
(Here is someone who is looking for God; these wild children appear; dark doors are open, unleashing demons)
Andrés Kaiser, El Universal (Mexico City), September 26, 2020
A remarkable debut film by Andrés Kaiser, Feral is a self-assured exploration of psychological horror and the documentary style. And as such it is a befitting choice for the new series at the Latin American Cinemateca, Cine Nepantla - Celebrating liminal spaces in film, music and poetry. Taking its name from the language of the Aztecs in the 16th century, ‘nepantla’ describes the state of living in-between different cultures, reflecting the encounter of the Hispanic and indigenous worlds. By extension, this new screening series presents titles that open up a rich dialogue about style, substance and context, from multiple perspectives.
Feral was the film selected for Cine Nepantla in 2020. It would have been screened last March at the Downtown Independent – the site of the Azteca theater in the thirties and forties, a venue in downtown Los Angeles showing Spanish-language cinema. The screening was cancelled, and also the Q&A with director Andrés Kaiser, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The unruly virus also impacted the film’s release, after a successful run in festivals in Mexico and internationally in 2019.
Born in San Luis Potosí in 1984, and studying directing and screenwriting in Madrid, Andrés Kaiser brought to this film his experience as an editor – among his credits, episodes of the TV prison series
Capadocia (2012) and
Drunk History: El lado borroso de la Historia (2016, 2017). He wrote several drafts of Feral in the workshop of renowned Mexican journalist and screenwriter, Vicente Leñero, an important member of the 1970s New Mexican cinema, together with Arturo Ripstein, Felipe Cazals and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. From conception to screen, the project took seven years.
Built as a television news investigative report set the present time, Feral tells the story of Juan Felipe de Jesús González (Héctor Illañes), a former Benedictine monk who became a psychoanalyst living as a hermit in the Oaxacan mountains. He left the Church but not the faith, and in the process of trying to re-educate three feral children, recorded on dozens of videotape, destroyed himself and them. Twenty years after the fire that killed them, a television crew revisits the location and interviews the villagers nearby, to piece together what truly happened.
The plot is built as a documentary reconstruction of these tragic events – à la
Citizen Kane (1941) - remembered from multiple perspectives over this twenty-year gap. It includes interviews, news footage and a cache of the fateful experiment’s videotapes. The multilayered narrative combines intersecting threads that shed light on a troubled individual’s psychological unravelling. The first one is the ex-monk and friend, José Ángel García playing himself, based on the true story of a monastery in disarray after the Second Vatican Council. It provides the historical context of the film, and a vehicle for its political critique. The second set of stories involve those Oaxacans who befriended the hermit, especially Eustaquio (José Luis González Sánchez, a non-professional actor), providing a human glimpse of a man who meant well. In this second narrative thread,
Feral takes several cues from
Canoa: A Shameful Memory, the 1976 landmark political film by Felipe Cazals, a fictionalization of a true event shot as a television reportage, about superstitious peasants and a local priest involved in the massacre of university employees alleged to be communists.
Feral shares its story structure, the ominous setting, the suspense and the horror.
The use of “discovered” footage provides Feral its strong narrative spine, since it increasingly reveals the pieces of the puzzle. Even though the viewer knows from the beginning the fate of the protagonist and his wards, the suspense is skillfully built, like the classic Sunset Boulevard (1950), Canoa and television procedurals. In this case it is done through the carefully crafted ominous musical score and sound effects, and the geographical setting (the mountains of Cuernavaca standing for Oaxaca, in exquisite crane shots). The found footage follows the technique of The Blair Witch Project (1999) by making the black-and-white video images look and sound old and scratchy, revealing and concealing simultaneously.
The casting process resulted in an interesting set of performances – from non-professional actors, including the three children, the Indian woman speaking Mixe, and Eustaquio; to academics playing themselves as historians, like John Mraz, a Latin American film and literature expert; to professional actors. The director noted that he worked over one year with Farid Escalante, Juan Galicia Reséndiz and Kari Ramu - the boys and girl he selected from over 150 - to achieve the movements of children raised in the wild. Kaiser has mentioned François Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage (1970), based on a true medical case, and William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, as references.
Feral also sinks a few roots in the cinema of Luis Buñuel, showing the family and the Catholic Church as repressive institutions par excellence. The use of family photos focused on a castrating mother, and the shots of the beautiful baroque church as an impenetrable fortress function as visual explanations on how the protagonist – and his brother (José Concepción Macías), in a surprising narrative twist - became monsters. Taking a thematic cue from
Canoa, evil is shown as intangible and embodied in those that claim to represent God. The director himself has made observations in interviews about faith and family as the locus of horror (1).
If these religious overtones, made explicit in the final montage, do not stay at the forefront of the film, it is because Feral is conscious of its own techniques to the extent that one may say that the faux-documentary style is Feral’s real subject. It makes for great genre pyrotechnics, and perhaps, once the pandemic allows it, Feral may still make a splash, like the bold arrivals of Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, coming out of left field, did in 1993 and 2000.
Notes
(1) Alessandra Rangel, “Andrés Kaiser – el cine mexicano de género está más vivo que nunca”, October 6, 2020.https://www.palomitademaiz.net/andres-kaiser-el-cine-mexicano-de-genero-esta-mas-vivo-que-nunca/
List of Sources
Film at Lincoln Center - Scary Movies series. New York, September 3, 2019. https://www.filmlinc.org/films/feral/. Post-screening interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yERVl-w2fkY
"La historia de un religioso que halla a tres niños busca un Ariel". El Universal, September 26, 2020.
https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/espectaculos/la-historia-de-un-religioso-que-halla-tres-ninos-busca-un-ariel
Lang, Jamie, “Los Cabos Best Mexican Film ‘Feral’ Picked up by One Eyed Films”. Variety, November 30, 2018. https://variety.com/2018/film/global/feral-sales-rights-one-eyed-films-1203066298/
Ortiz García, Eric, “Fantastic Fest 2018 Review: Feral, Andrés Kaiser's Worthy Debut Feature”.
Screen Anarchy website, October 4, 2018. https://screenanarchy.com/2018/10/fantastic-fest-2018-review-feral.html
Podcast: Filmmaker Andres Kaiser talks the faux Mexican doc "Feral" at Fantastic Fest [2018]
https://soundcloud.com/horror-happensrs/filmmaker-andres-kaiser-talks-feral
Thomas, David. Review of Feral. Sounds and Colours website, September 16, 2019. https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/mexico/feral-47704/
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