Screening in Short Film Competition, For the Opponents follows Damián, a young boy Iiving in the tough neighbourhood of Tepito, who is chasing the great Mexican dream – to become a boxing champion.
The 15-minute Mexico, Chile, France, UK film is written and directed by Federico Luis and produced by Planta, Cárcava, Fiasco and Deptford Film, with co-pro credits taken by Les films du Worso, Estudios Churubusco Azteca, Cineteca Nacional de Chile, Aura Lens Rental. Sales are handled by Luxbox Films.
Director Luis explains the immediate fascination he felt when he first encountered his subject.
“His gaze moved me deeply. I couldn’t take my eyes off him from the moment he began warming up outside the ring, during the fight, or after it ended,” he says. I tried to understand why I couldn’t stop looking at him. I think that, through his eyes, I felt I could glimpse a completely different perspective on the disturbing world of children’s boxing: it allowed me to see it from a more sensitive, more porous, more complex, and more empathetic angle than that initial, flat, rational shock that had gripped me at first. I felt that all the emotions floating in that gym were condensed into Damián’s expressive. And I really wanted to film him.
In the film, adults are mainly kept out of the frame. Why does Luis film this way? “What led me to make this short film wasn’t the desire to ‘portray reality’ or a ‘wholeness, but simply to capture Damián’s narrow, subjective view of that world. It was a way to explore that perspective, to try to understand it, to play at recreating it,” he responds.
“I was excited by the idea of entering that state of euphoria and exhaustion so characteristic of childhood—a state in which the rest of the world is put on hold and nothing seems to exist except what one feels. That’s why I wasn’t so interested in the adults themselves, but only as ghostly presences hovering over the child’s point.”
