By Mafe Simonsen
TropicalFRONT talked with Laura Santullo and Rodrigo Plá, directors of The Other Tom / El otro Tom, about the creative process behind the gripping and honest drama about Elena, a young, immigrant single mother, and her son Tom, who has recently been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
The film premiered in the Orizzonti competition at the 2021 edition of the Venice Film Festival, and has won numerous awards at different film festival including for Best Film at Huelva, Best Actress Award at Tokyo, Best Director Award at Warsaw and Morelia. The film received also five nominations for Mexico’s Ariel Awards including for Best Film, Best Actor, Best Editing, and Original screenplay. The Other Tom is currently having a U.S. theatrical run, with an exclusive engagement at the Cinema Village in New York City.
The Other Tom offers a possibility to think about normality and obedience, as well as the domination of rationality in the Western World. The loneliness experienced by the film’s main characters, Elena and Tom, reflects the reality of the lack of sensitivity on the part of social services to take into account the specific circumstances of individual families.
Santullo (director and screenwriter of the film and writer of the book) and Plá (director and screenwriter of the film) are an Uruguayan-Mexican writer/director duo and parents, and The Other Tom is their first English-language film, which was shot in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. To better understand the process behind this beautiful story and this ten-year project, we talked to them about their practice.
In the case of The Other Tom, the novel and the film were written and made simultaneously. Can you talk about the process of constructing this story and how this collaboration was for you?
It was indeed a unique process. The first thing that actually happened was long research on the different child behavior disorders and the psychiatric medication to treat them. We approached the subject through very different texts and materials related to psychology and psychiatry. Then the path was divided into two parallel processes that were always in contact and fed each other. Two forms of writing, two ways of approaching and inventing events.
The novel was fortunate to reach completion earlier and was published four years ago, but the script continued to walk independently, with changes, findings, and modifications. This time in the field, the last investigation took us to El Paso and Ciudad Juarez on the border and allowed us to walk the path of reality. We learned firsthand how to care for troubled children functioned, both in the schools and in the specialists' offices.
This led to new changes and differences between the book and film. However, although they are different, we believe that both processes and results are motivated by the same desire: to understand what happens in the world of children and to question a diagnosis that simplifies the human experience and medication that calms, disciplines, but ultimately does not cure.
Exploring the absence of the state in the character's life is something shared between all your films and literature. However, The other Tom is the opposite, a state that is highly present and even authoritarian. How do you see the relationship between Tom and Elena's story and the United States?
While constructing the events that would be the backbone of the story, we found that the possibility of losing custody and seeing our little fictional family disintegrate was an element that added drama to the film and placed the mother's character in ethical dilemmas. In this sense, it seemed fortunate to place the story in a framework where the State could affect family decisions, with institutions very present, as you rightly point out.
That is why while the project was being written, we always had in mind to film somewhere in the United States. This is not to say that State intervention cannot be beneficial in many cases, sometimes indispensable. Still, we thought it would be interesting to observe closely that tense boundary between the public and the private.
Then came the idea that our characters were also Mexican-Americans. We found that the mother's migrant status brings a degree of vulnerability to the character because she depends on social services without fully understanding how the system works. If told elsewhere, the story would probably have different twists and turns; in countries where the State is far from the citizens, the dangers for the family would have been different. However, the social and school stigma attached to the diagnosis of ADHD would probably not be so different because, unfortunately, that is very widespread.
Your films and literature are characterized by the attention to detail in each part of the process. For example, the casting of the film, can you tell us about the process of workshops and training the non-professional actors?
The decision to shoot our film in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez was a turning point in the process. The Other Tom seeks to convey the absurdity of trying to pigeonhole people and reduce them to only one of their characteristics, specifically to impose a label with a mental diagnosis. The basis of the film is the idea that the identity of any person is built from many aspects, and in this sense, the border, with its bi-culturality, with its unclassifiable citizens, served to add another layer of meaning to what we were building.
This decision led us to desist from bringing professional actors from the Mexican City to choose to look for our cast in El Paso/Juarez, preserving the characteristics and singularities of speech and behavior that seemed to us to be a discovery. To facilitate the task, the actors who would play the characters in real life had jobs or situations similar to those in the fiction, such as the teachers and school principal, who have the same jobis in real life. In the case of the children, several free workshops were held in a public library, and a playful space was generated, which was also a training and learning place for the young actors who would play all the children in the classroom.
In the middle of both processes, casting the adults and the children's workshops, we had the good fortune to find Julia Chávez and Israel Rodriguez, two singular beings gifted with an immense imagination, who accepted the challenge. We worked with them specifically seeking to create and strengthen the filial bond through improvisations, situations that do not exist in the script but that allowed them to generate that bond and emotional memory of the characters. An intense work that they knew how to take advantage of wonderfully well to develop a genuine and beautiful Elena and Tom.
