The Genius of Amat Escalante Mexican drug lords, hanging bodies and sexual trauma are part of the violent, bewildering elements in Amat Escalante’s filmmaking arsenal. This 35-year old Mexican director, a protégé of Carlos Reygadas, is part of the generation redefining the horror, thriller genre. Escalante’s genius comes from his stunning balance between perversion and pleasure, all while tackling political, social and moral corruption.
His feature film Heli, a gruesome rendition about the ravages of drug trafficking in Mexico, earned him the award for Best Director at Cannes Film Festival in 2013. He was also awarded the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 2016 Venice Film Festival for his film The Untamed, an eerie, erotic sci-fi drama about homophobia, misogyny, and bodily entanglements. Escalante is also the director of the second season of Narcos:Mexico (2020). Amat Escalante’s cinematic achievement is his unique ability to channel obscenity, disgust, and outrage as a mechanism for social commentary. The perversion and nausea his film’s create echo the reality of reading a Mexican newspaper headline. Monsters with phallic tentacles, dead bodies off bridges, and body parts on fire serve as a chilling reminder: nightmare is reality in contemporary Mexico. Argo has teamed up with this pioneer in Mexican cinema to create a playlist of erratic short films that teeter between the bizarre and the profound. Here are Amat’s hand-selected favorite shorts. Watch now on ARGO.


