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One journey, full of hope, turns into the start of an aching search for answers in Fernanda Valadez’s “Identifying Features.” This artful Mexican drama begins when Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela) tells his mother Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) that he is going north to the United States with a friend for a job opportunity. But months pass, and there’s still no word from him. Finally, Magdalena ventures out on her own journey to find out what happened to her son.
In many movies about immigration, the story often follows those on that journey towards a hopefully better place. The friends or family left behind may have some screen time at the beginning but they soon fade into the background as our hero or heroes move on. In “Identifying Features,” we see the concern and worry of a mother left behind, one forced to leave the comforts and familiarity of home in Guanajuato in search of her son. This was not her journey to make, but it is one she pursues out of love, despite the
Matters of life and death beyond mere borders
By Ty Burr Globe Staff,Updated January 20, 2021, 6:52 p.m.
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David Illescas in Indentifying Features. Kino Lorber
An austere, gorgeously shot parable of chaos and loss in modern Mexico, âIdentifying Featuresâ is an assured directorial debut from Fernanda Valadez, an audience award winner at Sundance 2020, and a tour of hell on earth. Itâs playing as a virtual screening via the Brattle Theatre.
Two teenage boys, Rigo (Armando GarcÃa) and Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela), leave their homes in Guanajuato for promised jobs in Arizona; they never arrive. Their mothers, Chuya (Laura Elena Ibarra) and Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández), go to the police but are told there is little to do but search the photographs of people recently killed by drug cartels and gangs. Jesús is identified as one of the corpses retrieved from a shallow grave, but Rigo is not. Magdalena heads out on a search that crisscrosses
Endurance is something we can all identify with these days. No matter who or where you are, weathering the toughest of times without giving way has become a universally shared experience, and we often look to art to reflect and inspire our lives.
Endurance is at the heart of co-writer and director Fernanda Valadez’s debut narrative film, “Identifying Features,” a Spanish-language drama that has won over 15 awards on the festival circuit, including Best international Feature at last week’s Gotham Independent Film Awards.
“Identifying Features” is scheduled to open Jan. 22 at Athens Ciné, and will be available for streaming rental via the theater’s “virtual cinema” platform, which has helped the downtown nonprofit remain in business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Some movies wound us so profoundly that once darkness has consumed their final frame we are incapable of shaking off the heartache. That’s the power of
Identifying Features,
as
painfully intimate as it is unsparing in its indictment of a country ravaged by a corrosive, entrenched evil. Making her feature debut, Mexican writer-director Fernanda Valadez finds a personal tragedy within a national one the murder or disappearance of thousands of people, the mass collateral damage of the ongoing drug war. She’s made a humanitarian lament by way of a slow-burn thriller.
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Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández), from Guanajuato, travels north to the border in search of her underage son, Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela). Two months earlier, he agreed to migrate to the U.S. with his best friend, Rigo (Armando García), in hopes of overcoming their adverse economic circumstances. In that time, no news of the boys’ whereabouts has arrived. In a sobering opening scene that set