“Diaz manages to keep the balance between continuing on the path of his first film and progressing to a whole other level in terms of means and ambitions – a fact embodied by the casting of Bérénice Béjo for the main role.”

Guatemalan film director César Diaz started delving into his country’s traumatic past – the military dictatorship and the civil war that lasted for over thirty years, until the 1990s – in his feature-length debut Our Mothers, which won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. This first film used as a basis the strenuous work of forensic specialists trying to identify victims of the massacres perpetrated by the armed forces. Through this task the main character was also looking for his own father, a guerilla resistance fighter who disappeared and was probably killed in the 1980s. With his second feature, Mexico 86, Diaz seemingly expands the story of Our Mothers. There is once again a dead father, executed by the military, and his son; this time, there is also the boy’s mother Maria, working for the resistance as well and thus forced to flee to the neighboring country of Mexico. Mother and son will be reunited years later, when the boy’s grandmother becomes too ill to look after him anymore – right at the same time when the mother is given a mission, to have the names of army officers in charge of the mass murders and torture published in a Mexican newspaper, which will put her life in peril.

Diaz manages to keep the balance between continuing on the path of his first film (part of his crew was the same, for instance, for cinematography and music), and progressing to a whole other level in terms of means and ambitions – a fact embodied by the casting of Bérénice Béjo for the main role. Mexico 86 navigates, with equal success, between sharp action sequences typical of the spy genre (a car chase in the city streets, a sudden assassination in plain sight, shot in one continuous take), and tender scenes taking place inside the family circle. Diaz and Béjo make us believe in the veracity of Maria in both parts of her life, through their combined ability to make the character and her scenes work in each context – the rhythm, the length, the editing are completely different, as is the actress’s performance – whether the sequence is a suspenseful or an intimate one. Hence, the film proves to be as solid and moving in the two narrative paths initiated by its opening scene, and the impossible dilemma it holds: leaving behind either your child, or everything you ever stood for and continue to fight for.

Maria stands resolute in her determination to preserve both: be a mother and at the same time an active freedom fighter. Yet, heartbreakingly, what we mostly see is a woman who has no place anywhere. The film is the visual reflection of the limbo Maria lives in, being neither here (the place where she lives in exile) nor there (in her homeland). Diaz never gives us the full picture of her surroundings because the character herself does not have it. Having to live in constant hiding, she is barely more than a ghost wandering around Mexico City, a town that we in turn only get to see glimpses of, as she does – the Football World Cup, which the film’s title alludes to, is spoken about but remains far off-screen. Likewise, since she has been away from Guatemala for over a decade, the events and the history of her country reach her (and us) in an indirect and incomplete way, through logbooks of dead and tortured activists or brief archival footage and newspaper clippings. At the time Mexico 86 takes place, Guatemala’s present looks bleak and Maria’s future even bleaker. She stands on the verge of losing everything despite all her worthy efforts, as the film ends up embracing the point of view of the left-behind son, conceivably a portrayal of the director himself.