After a successful world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Gian Cassini’s powerful debut documentary Comala will have its U.S. premiere at the 12th edition of DOC NYC, taking place in-person and online from November 11-18, 2021.
A bold inquiry into the roots of his own family’s trauma, Comala provides poignant insight into the nuanced ways that Mexico’s War on Drugs has infiltrated and affected the family sphere, offering audiences an unvarnished and increasingly important personification of the repercussions of normalized violence.
Director Cassini grew up the only child of a single mother in Monterrey, Mexico. His father left when he was still young, maintaining only intermittent contact, and started a parallel family, giving Gian a half brother and sister that he came to know as he grew older. In Comala, the director’s assured first feature, 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 for better or worse 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. In the process of making the film itself and through the perspective of a queer lens, Cassini unpacks the web of toxic masculinity that has impacted his own life and addresses the cruel aftermath of abandonment head on, while still making sure to humanize those that are most often cast as the perpetrators.
In searching for the root of his own family’s pain, 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 that lay at its core. At the same time, it also establishes Cassini as a filmmaker to watch for his ability to deliver a profound social commentary wrapped skillfully in a journey of self-discovery.
