La Ausencia

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Note of intent

This film is my cover letter inspired the indigenous traditions of my native region. For me this is a fertile ground from which I like to unearth these absences, sometimes the secret reason for our anguish. My films go beyond a crime and the fatality that these events entail. The fatality itself is the process of unearthing my stories. What is unearthed is almost always a terrible truth, in this case that horror that resides in the heart of our nature.

Synopsis

Valladolid, México (1750’s). When Elena, a widow with syphilis, remarries Servando, a well known pig farmer, her symptoms suddenly worsen before her wedding day. She secretly finds a doctor to apply a mercury therapy, but when she arrives at Servando’s pig farm after the ceremony with her children and her maid Teresa, she has not recovered and knows she must keep her body hidden from her new husband. The worse her disease gets and the longer she cannot consummate the marriage, the further she pushes Servando from confusion into a deep anxiety that he cannot control. When he murders Teresa’s son, Elena takes her revenge by finally consummating the marriage in complete darkness. And in surrendering to the disease, she becomes a conduit for the power of Coatlicue, the Mexican mother goddess.

© Jorge Sistos Moreno

Visual concept

The greatest absence in La Ausencia is that of the indigenous traditions of my home region, but the purpose of the story is to show their real power. The style of the movie will reflect the Catholic baroque of the eighteenth century, both by starting with a marriage in a church and through the calm naturalism of the camera. But the power of nature and of indigenous beliefs, embodied by the Mexican mother goddess Coatlicue, will ultimately prove stronger than these transplanted European beliefs.