Natalia Villegas as Maribel and Julio César Cedillo as Father Tomás.

‘The Mourning of’ has attracted critical acclaim in the festival circuit, and thanks to its Oscar qualifying win at St Louis, has the potential to become only the second Latinx production to be nominated (or even hopefully win) the ‘Best Live Action Short Film’- at the Academy Awards (the first having been K.D Dávila’s nomination for “Please Hold “in 2022). Elizondo did not immediately register the importance of this win, until the prestigious London Flair PR contacted him, (for which he is deeply grateful) and offered to help him run his campaign for the ultimate award. He admits that things have never been the same since: -

“’Manos de Oro’ did very well. It changed my life. My first two[films] were really just like my film school, they taught me what I needed, I had to opportunity to mess up, experiment and try different styles. So it wasn’t until ‘Manos de Oro’ that I started to feel confident as a director and someone with a vision.  It did incredibly well and became a cultural phenomenon in a way I could not have expected. [It] is based on a real experience of my dad. In 2018, he got sick and at the time, while he was in the hospital, I was into watching NARCOS MEXICO at the time, (fortunately he is fine now).    As I watched Narcos Mexico, I noticed Julio César Cedillo and thought he was such a good actor (who plays Calderón in the show). I had seen him in Sicario, and also in Cowboys and Aliens and The Three Burials of Melquíades Estrada. At the time I had just started to write ‘Manos de Oro’ and I figured:  ‘he’s also from Durango Mexico, where my family come from (check)- He lives near Dallas in Fort Worth (check) and that was it!  I thought I need to work with this guy and, to cut a long story short, we struck up a friendship and he became the lead in ‘Manos de Oro’ and it changed my life.”

Possibly thanks to the success of ‘Manos de Oro’, Elizondo was awarded the NewNarratives Film makers Grant, through NewFilmmakers Los Angeles and Warner Bros. and thus managed to raise the circa 2million dollars he needed for ‘The Mourning of.’  It was presented as a proof-of-concept short film for a debut feature and turned out to be the fourth short film of Elizondo, but he admits it was actually his first ever idea for a movie and all thanks to a member of his own family: -

“I originally had the idea in December 2016, when I was driving my grandmother back from Mexico and she was telling me about something I had never heard of: ‘Mujeres Planideras.’  These are women that dress up, all in black in Mexico and go to mourn at funerals. Like criers. I thought that was bloody brilliant. I had not heard of it before and had no idea it existed.  I got back home to Texas and googled what it was and found a service that was called “Rent-a-Mourner.co.uk”.

Basically, for US$62 an hour you can rent a mourner to turn up and talk to the family about the deceased- Tell me about him/ her … when she was a kid etc. They would go to the funeral and pretend to be a mourner and chat with people: “I knew him/ her when they were younger” … people can go to a stranger’s funeral, but there is a grey ethical space where you are drinking the wine of other people, eating their food and breaking bread with strangers and, in a sense, invading the worst day of the lives of many of these people. It might be coming from a good place in trying to celebrate the deceased’s life, whether they knew them or not, so that space was very interesting to me. What is even more interesting is not someone who does it for money, getting paid for their service, but someone who does it because they feel that they have to. 

It was the first idea for a movie that I ever had. I also knew I wanted to make three of four shorts before I made it because I knew that this story would be huge, require a lot of skill, expertise and effort, and of course, a lot of people. To have 175 extras here in Texas was a suicide mission, but we pulled it off! [The film] borrows a lot from feelings that I have had from losing people in my own life, though not autobiographically as such. A lot of my family live here; they come and go, so I have been to a lot of funerals. but I have never been to the funeral of a stranger, yet I thought about it when I was writing, you know. I have lost people and that grief acts like a space for the person you lost in your life. Like with Maribel who has lost her mother and is not ready to move on yet. She is acting like an empathy grief umpire as if frozen in amber, as she tries to remember her mother and this feeling. “     

Natalia Villegas as Maribel at a stranger's funeral

“The Mourning of” deals with grief in a most unusual way.  A young woman, Maribel (played by the charismatic Natalia Villegas), is trying to deal with the tragic loss of her mother Irma (Maggie Pomales). She searches for solace by secretly attending the funerals of strangers and trying to comfort them in a way she cannot comfort herself.  She obsessively struggles to cope, scouring the newspaper ‘Obituary’ columns, unable to move on or even cry for her own loss. All the while observed by the local priest Tomás (the magnetic Julio César Cedillo) who tries to help her: “Hiding out in other’s people’s grief does not dissolve you having to deal with your own.” 

There is another film that comes to mind where a similar thing happens, ‘Harold and Maude’(1971) but though it also has the element of black humour, the action happens for totally different reasons.  In "The Mourning  Of" there are two main characters but it is as if there were three, as the mother, Irma remains a haunting and powerful ghostly presence, as Maribel holds onto her memory, desperately hoping she will never go away. 

Elizondo has managed to elicit mesmerizing performances from his leads in a sensitive and deeply moving way, but working with actors was not always easy for him: -

“I have to give credit to Julio because on ‘Manos de Oro’ he shaped my entire  perception of what it means to work with actors because I thought : I might say I came from a school of thought, but I had no ‘thought’ really because I did not go to school for this, so I thought I was going to be Mr Director and you have to say every word the way I wrote it.  Julio just threw a knife at that, completely! 

No, we have to leave room for magic, and he changed my way of filmmaking. So now moving forward, every production I work with actors who I trust wholeheartedly. It’s a relationship, we work together… can I trust you?  Can you trust me? …[now] I am the assistant director’s worst nightmare because I try to leave room for that factor that you can never really quantify. 

I started as a writer. I would  say I did not follow a very traditional path. I didn’t go to film school., I’m a Mexican-American from Dallas, Texas and my parents are from Mexico. No one in my family ever dared to have a career in the arts, you know, there are no Latinos making movies, at least not in my family, so I had no heroes to look up to … I went to the University of Texas in Austen where I studied advertising thinking that might satisfy the itch for creativity…  

It wasn’t until the summer of 2015 that I did an internship at NBC Universal in New York and I got to move there and I got to work at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, a really big building…I begged a production company to please give me the opportunity: “I want to learn, I don’t know anything about sets, cameras, lenses or lighting, I don’t know anything”! Little by little I got experience and learned and taught myself everything I know.

Padre Tomás ( Julio César Cedillo) in his church

The final scene in ‘The Mourning Of’, is key to the whole story. Amazingly, by the time they reached it, they had only 56 minutes left in which to shoot this vital scene, but Natalia delivers to perfection and the scene is profoundly moving as a result. 

Merced Elizondo 

‘The Mourning of’ also stands out for its superb craftsmanship. It is beautifully put together. The various elements, the lighting, the cameraman, the colourist and sound meld seamlessly together and, with the performances, you find yourself glued to the screen.  Elizondo is very modest in his approach, but clearly his vision has shone through, and he has no lack of enthusiasm and energy to put into his projects. He is very clear on one point: “I will never, never stop writing!”   Questioned as to where he plans to go from here, Elizondo admits to being deep in the throes of writing his first feature film, even as the pressures of the Oscar campaign start to eat into his time. 

“The Thing about Elephants” will be about a couple, Oscar and Nancy who have been together since they first met as toddlers. They then became childhood sweethearts and now, in their thirties, they awake as if after a long sleep, to become aware of how far their very beings are intertwined as one, losing themselves into their mundo, or world, that they have created together.  Have they started to disintegrate as individuals? - 

“Is this it? Is this all there is to life? …  how can I remain ‘me’ within ‘we’ because at some point you are neither Oscar or Nancy, you are only a unit, your whole identity is wrapped up around this other person… what life can await me without Oscar or Nancy, without this anchor in my life that |IO have known for my entire existence?”

That is the ‘elephant in the room?’ What, in the end, is their raison d’être? Or have they merged so far that it is lost forever?

It is fascinating to see how Elizondo veers towards themes that are profound and existential, dealing with the deepest emotions of our inner beings. These are among the most challenging themes to communicate in film, and in ‘The Mourning of’ Elizondo gives us a taste of how it can be done.

“It sounds icky to say that my ultimate dream is not an Oscar because I don’t make cinema for awards. I am not as prolific as many of my contemporaries because I am a very slow writer, you know. That is by design and very intentional, because I don’t make things just to make things, especially now. You get something on a streamer and it premieres on a Thursday and them by Monday you are talking about the next best thing. [ My film] is important to me in my life when I make it, and I hope that it is important for other people too, so I just want the opportunity to be an original writer/ director like a Wes Anderson, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Iñarritú and Guillermo del Toro, people who do their own thing and they are allowed the resources to create the projects of their dreams: 

That is my dream, just to keep on dreaming.” 

‘THE MOURNING OF’

Writer/Director: Merced Elizondo

Produced By: Helena Sardinha, Rafael Thomaseto, Alan Hodge, Merced Elizondo / Executive Producers: Liz Cardenas, Andrea Marquez / Co-Producer: Alfredo Achar / 

Director of Photography: Matheus Bastos / Production Designer: Jonathan Rudak / Edited By: Jonathan Cuartas / Post-Production Sound Editor/Sound Designer: Javier Umpierrez /Music By: René G. Boscio /Colourist: Sam Daley

STARRING: Natalia Villegas, Julio César Cedillo, Maggie Pomales

Facebook.com/the mourningofmovie

Instagran.com/themourningofmovie/

Twitter.com/themourningof