All the Fires
original title: Todos los incendios
2023, 96 min., color, Spanish
CATEGORIES : Drama, Debut, LQBTQ
COUNTRY: Mexico
PRODUCTION : BUDGET : 598 000 euro
CAST
Sebastian Rojano, Jimena Ayala, Natalia Quiroz, Ari López
CREW
Director : Screenplay : Mauricio Calderon RicoCinematographer : Miguel Escudero
Producers : Daniel Loustaunau, Araceli Velázquez
COMMENTS
DIRECTOR’S NOTES: “Fire will attract more attention than any other cry for help,” says Jean Michel Basquiat. I’ve always seen his paintings as a glimpse into the mind of a teenager: disorder, chaos, the uninhibited and amusing, as well as their sexuality, which is a burning match. Bruno is a young man who uses fire as a cry for help, and who doesn’t really get an answer because his fire is so low in intensity (he is not yet a pyromaniac in the full extent of the word) and it’s lost in the virtual world of YouTube, that goes virtually unnoticed in the real world. I want to tell this story, because although there are anecdotes that are fiction, it arises from an autobiographical root, from a personal mourning and an epistolary relationship based on a lie, that sometimes one must believe to stay afloat. This story was born as my thesis project, that I presented to graduate from a master’s degree in Screenplay. I was anxious to talk about personal topics, such as the loss of my father, my mother falling in love with another man, and my own sexual acceptance. I wanted to focus on sexual diversity, but from another perspective: something mysterious that is discovered while the story passes through. Nowadays, despite the fact that the mentality of Mexican people has been opening up, giving way to sexual diversity manifestations, there are children who continue to live in the closet for many years, unfortunately…”
SYNOPSIS
Bruno, a misunderstood teenager, has developed an obsession for burning objects, recording them and uploading the videos to the internet as a way of dealing with his father’s death. When his lonely mother starts dating another man, Bruno escapes from home and goes to another town to live with Daniela, a young pyromaniac that he met online, and with whom has an epistolary relationship. The painful separation with his mother and his best friend Ian makes him question his sexuality and his capacity to overcome the loss of his father.