Gian Cassini’s powerful debut documentary Comala will have its world premiere in the TIFF Docs section at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, which will take place September 9-18. The captivating and daring true-crime odyssey follows the director on his personal journey In search for his absent father, discovering the ghosts of Mexico’s failed war on drugs along the way.
Director Cassini grew up the only child of a single mother in Monterrey, Mexico. His father, with whom he had only intermittent contact, had left when he was a child and started a parallel family, giving Gian a brother and sister that he came to know as he got older.
In Comala, Cassini puts his magnifying glass to the ground as he embarks on an intimate true-crime odyssey that criss-crosses Mexico, stops over in Cuba, and settles in San Antonio, Texas. One family member at a time, Cassini puts together the puzzle pieces that form an image of his late father — El Jimmy, a small-time hitman and drug trafficker in Tijuana — allowing him, and the rest of his family, to make sense of the man that made them who they are.
Comala, named after the town where Juan Rulfo’s landmark 1955 novel Pedro Páramo takes place, bears witness to one family’s quest for personal truth, a journey that along the way uncovers a network of men stuck within deeply-rooted patterns of machismo; victims of their own intergenerational trauma.
Cassini unpacks this web of toxic masculinity that has informed his own life, and addresses the pain of abandonment head on. In searching for the root of his own family’s heartbreak, Cassini’s story offers unprecedented access into the personal ramifications of Mexico’s War on Drugs, and gives voice to the countless women and children who are left behind by the vicious cycles of violence, drug abuse, and internalized misogyny at its core.
