Synopsis
In certain parts of the Mexican countryside, work begins in childhood. These young people, like their ancestors, are caught in a daily struggle to survive. The first moments of Los Herederos (The Inheritors) depict a perfectly ordinary situation: morning rituals at home before going to work. An ordinary situation, yes, but one detail is important: it is not a father or a mother who is about to go to work, but a very young child. Children who inherit the work of hard labour, a legacy that the director, Eugenio Polgovsky, shoots through the smooth and untouched faces of some of the children, or the burned faces of some of their forebears who worked themselves to death throughout their lifetime. It is this social reality that Polgovsky strives to depict in a raw way, dispensing with all commentary throughout. Unlike Depardon, Polgovsky is content to let the images follow one another, giving us an observational film that avoids maudlin uplifting narratives, whose strength of purpose is undeniable. Just about wordlessly.
A word from Tënk
We find ourselves in Mexico, in Guerrero, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Puebla, and Veracruz states. In this taciturn film with ethnographic settings, we follow the inheritors of a world in which, this time around, domination isn’t exercised upon nature but upon humans, very small humans. The filmmaker acquaints us with this idea that in certain places, children don’t have childhoods, as if the country itself had no reason to grow up.
This film doesn’t exaggerate or underline, does not help us in any way to judge this situation. It only brings us closer, in a cinematic way, to an experience of an actual reality. Everything is camouflaged behind its evidently political title, The inheritors, those who harvest all that we create: climate disaster, a damaged natural world, humans without childhoods, and all of this, in silence.
This experiential film doesn’t inform, it evokes feeling. It leaves its silent trace of the legacy in question: “The fall of the living world located outside of the field of the collective and political attention, outside the field of what we deem to be important, it is there we find the inaugural event of the crisis of sensitivity.” -Baptiste Morizot, 2020.
Sylvie Lapointe
Filmmaker
