FAUNA
A film by Nicolás Pereda
(Mexico/Canada, 2020, 70 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)

A playful artist of the switch-up, Mexico-born filmmaker Nicolás Pereda creates shifting, often elusive fictions with a recurring troupe of actors. In his nimble new film, an actress Luisa (Luisa Pardo) brings home her affable boyfriend Paco (Francisco Barreiro) to see her family, but they cross paths with her standoffish brother Gabino (Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez). For a while, a tense but increasingly funny comedy of manners and machismo unfolds as her father (Jose Rodríguez López) enters the picture: in one beguiling and funny set piece, dad asks hapless boyfriend to reprise his small role from a TV drugs trade dram on the spot. (Barreiro, a Pereda regular like his co-stars, indeed acted in the show Narcos: Mexico.)

Meanwhile, Luisa rehearses amusingly loaded dialogue with her long-sufering mom (Teresita Sánchez). But then a new world of fictions is born when the film spins off into a trickier story relating to a disappearance, which just so happens to star all the same actors (with the help of a wig or two). Staging much of the unpredictable action in nondescript and deserted locales, Pereda allows the strains of menace and even violence that can shadow ordinary life in Mexico to seep into his film.

Friday, March 11, 7pm and Sunday, March 13, 5:30pm
*Director Nicolás Pereda in attendance
Roxie Theater
3117 16th Street, San Francisco, CA
(415) 863-1087
For tickets and more information visit www.roxie.com

Watch the trailer: