Grit & Ground

Shorts Block @ The Sie Film Center

Friday, September 19, 2025

Doors: 6:00 pm / Screening: 7:00 pm

2510 E Colfax

After Party @ Forest Room 5

9:00 pm - late

2532 15th St

In the violent streets of Mexico City, Joel leads a double life fixing car engines by day and getting his hands dirty by night. Now, he must repair the toughest machine of all: his own shattered existence.

From hand drawing animation to complex transmedia pieces, Esteban Azuela (Mexico, 1984) experiments with the narrative possibilities of visual art, in an atypical space between fiction, documentary and dialogue with other disciplines. His videos and animated shorts have been exhibited in venues as diverse as the Palais de Tokio, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage and the Central de Abastos market, while his collaborations as a VJ and sound act visualist include equally diverse artists such as Richard Devine, Los Viejos, Black Devil Disco Club, Tristan Arp, Nick Zinner and Lourdes Grobet.

Director’s Statement:

Based on real events, in families close to mine, this story is contextualized in the 90s when extreme violence began to be more visible in the mass media and when North American popular culture began to permeate more through the Free Trade Agreement between the USA and Mexico, where we adopted symbols like the NFL as aspirational models.

I made this film trying to understand the origins of violence in my mexican reality and the growing glorification of criminal figures through pop culture. Narrating it from a character who constructs his strength through acceptance in a criminal group, justifying himself through his passion for cars and socioeconomic status but ultimately defeated by the ambivalence with his culture that bind him to family values. In the end, it’s the portrait of a failed heroic figure of masculinity.

It was also important for me to show these characters from the innocent perspective of a 10-year-old child, like the one I was at that time, and to realize how it almost imperceptibly permeated me with video games and figures of power and competitiveness. Bringing this elements to a more intimate term; the attachment to our memories and how to live more freely if we detach from them, seen through the duality in European and Nahuas beliefs about life after death and what we take with us when we die.

Using error as an aesthetic posture, I chose low-cost techniques to talk about the precariousness of the technology of an average user in Latin America and how films can be made with them, facing a hyperrealistic, polished and sterile aesthetic imposed by other the canons of digital filmmaking.