Later, a fictional film about the loss of a young son

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JADALAHARA – Ludwika Paleta and her son Nicolás Haza star in “After,” a fiction film directed by Sofía Gómez Córdova, in which the mother and son have a good relationship, but when the young descendant dies in the plot, she starts to give up on him saying she doesn’t know him well enough.

The story competed for the Mezcal, Marque and Jalisco Hercho awards at the 39th Guadalajara International Film Festival. Adriana Palafox, Luis Velázquez, Alan Oliva and Darío Rocas also star.

Gómez Córdova (Aguascalientes, 1983), co-writer of Somos Mari Pepa and Samuel Kishi’s Los lobos, said in an interview that the original idea for the story was Luis Briones.

“He was the screenwriter for my first film, Blue Days, and The Wolf Pack. This story came from a concern to portray a character who had lost a loved one, but it was very different from the way I knew him. That is, someone knows a person, and someone else knows this person in a different way.

All aspects are equally real, which is why they become a mystery when it is no longer possible for us to continue to know that part of a loved one who has passed away. It is a kind of mourning that goes beyond the fact that you miss someone, that I will never be able to know more about that person, who was full of complexities and contradictions like anyone else,” Cordova said.

In After (Mexico, 2024), Carmen faces the incomprehensible death of her only child, Jorge, and discovers that the deep friendship they formed after abandoning their father has been keeping secrets. Neither of them answers the mystery behind what could be a suicide, but they paint a contradictory portrait that forces her to confront her own blurred reflection.

The director then raised other topics:

“I wanted to explore the topic of motherhood and the decisions around motherhood and identity, and loss. The betrayal that a mother feels when she realises she didn’t know a lot about her son, even though they were best friends. This mother put aside her music career and her love of music to be a mother, and her son does understand how that affects him. I wanted to talk about the decisions that motherhood requires. “I think it’s something that all women worry about, even if they don’t want to have children.”

—How did you choose to work with Ludwika Paleta and your real-life son Nicolas Haza?

— Ludwika had been cast in this role for a long time. When I met her at a workshop we did together in 2019, we had just started writing the script and I told her that it would have been great if Nicolas had been another character, but that he was younger, lived in Canada, studied cinema and had no longer spoken. A few years later, when we began to work on the project, it became a serious question whether Nicolas would be willing to act. He had returned to live in Mexico and had developed an interest in acting, and Ludwika asked me if acting was right for him and I said yes. I asked him to ask him and he accepted the role.

“I spoke to Nicholas on the phone and I liked him a lot. He’s a very sweet boy. He seemed super transparent and sensible to me, and something inside me told me that this was obviously going to work. He had no acting experience at the time, but he had studied film and was very familiar with filming, and as the months went by, we started to get momentum, and he had other projects to act in, and he came with me with more experience. In fact, it was a pleasure to work with both of them, and I liked them very much.”

——People always say that mothers know their children very well, but here it is just the opposite. What do you think of this?

– We were interested in investigating how the people closest to this young character, especially the mother, felt about not being able to know more about him and other aspects of him that were private to her, in addition to the pain of facing his death, which called into question the trusting relationship she had with him, and she also had to deal with this feeling and anger in her grief.

“One of the driving forces I felt when we were writing the script was anger, and that came out a lot in those moments. There was tremendous sadness and pain, but there was also a lot of anger about how, as a stupid kid, you could do such a stupid thing, maybe, kill yourself, why would you kill yourself? If you weren’t feeling good, why didn’t you ask me for help?

——What made this film more complicated for you, unlike your previous films?

— The last film I directed, I’m not saying it was easy, but everything had to be put into its dimension, it was a film that took place in one location, this feature film was shot in two different cities. Also, there was a pick-up service at the beach. We creative people were even scattered around the world, the pandemic came, but we still managed to make this film.

“We signed the deal in five weeks, but the reality is that it took longer because of all the transfers involved. We had to be very flexible in order to keep to the work schedule and there were time constraints in various areas. I would have loved to have shot this scene in one beautiful continuous shot, but I didn’t have more time to do it. “I would have loved to have made a film where I could plan everything and have all the time in the world. ”