Sujo

With director Fernanda Valadez and cinematographer Ximena Amann (Sujo) and filmmaker Charlie Shackleton (Lateral) in person

Dirs. Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez. 2024, 125 mins. Mexico, United States, France. In Spanish with English subtitles. DCP. With Juan Jesús Varela, Yadira Perez Esteban, Sandra Lorenzano, Alexis Jassiel Varela, Jairo Hernández Ramírez. After his father is murdered by fellow cartel henchmen, four-year-old Sujo is snuck out of town by women who then raise him as their own. As Sujo grows into a young man, he and his friends follow temptation and the lure of easy money back into town, where further tragedy awaits. Unlike most stories set in the milieu of Mexican cartels, Sujo’s arc doesn’t end there. He moves to Mexico City to earn an honest, threadbare living, and begins to audit classes thanks to a sympathetic teacher. But violence still shadows him, and there may be a limit to what he can escape. Rondero and Valadez’s follow-up to their critically acclaimed Identifying Features has the time-spanning breadth of an epic and multifaceted cinematic chops to match. It also has an extraordinary fidelity to the lived moment, unfurling via a series of you-are-there long takes that assert Sujo’s humanity regardless of the traps ensnaring him. Sujo is a major work by two of the finest filmmakers of their generation. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize, World Dramatic Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. New York premiere 

Preceded by:
Lateral
Dir. Charlie Shackleton. 2023, 11 mins. 3D. Artist Charlie Shackleton (As Mine Exactly, The Afterlight) scours cinema history for hidden depths in this improvised experiment in perception, presented in stereoscopic 3D. World premiere

Tickets: $20 / $15 for MoMI members. Order tickets. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases. All seating is general admission. 

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Mexican writer, director, and producers Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez have collaborated for 15 years, producing the short films Of This World (2010), In Still Waters (2011), and 400 Bags (2014) and the features Sujo (2024) The Darkest Days of Us (2017), and Identifying Features (2020), which received awards at the Sundance, San Sebastian, Zurich, and Thessaloniki Film Festivals and a Gotham Award for Best International Film.

 

 

Charlie Shackleton is a nonfiction filmmaker living and working in London. His most recent work, the one-on-one performance film As Mine Exactly, won the Immersive Art & XR Award at last year’s BFI London Film Festival and went on to have extended runs at the Barbican Centre in London and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.