ASHES
Diego Luna presents Ceniza en la Boca (Ashes): Cannes journey
With Ceniza en la Boca (Ashes), Diego Luna presents his second fiction feature film in a Special Screening. Adapted from the novel by Brenda Navarro, a feminist voice of contemporary Spanish-speaking literature, the film follows a brother and sister who left Mexico to join their mother in Spain. This theme fuels his entire journey.
The Croisette first welcomed Diego Luna in 2003 as an actor in Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamina) by David Trueba, a screen adaptation of the eponymous novel about the Spanish Civil War. He returns in 2007 in Mister Lonely by Harmony Korine, selected for Un Certain Regard. It’s only in 2010 that he moves behind the camera and presents Abel, his first fiction feature film in a Special Screening. He walks the Red Carpet alongside the child actors from his movie, which tells the story of a nine-year-old boy who’s forced to become the head of the family after his father leaves. Abel was shot in Aguascalientes, the city where Luna and his co-screenwriter Augusto Mendoza spent part of their childhood. In 2016, he’s both a member of the jury for Un Certain Regard, chaired by Marthe Keller, and acting in Blood Father by Jean-François Richet presented in a Midnight Screening.
Ceniza en la boca (Ashes) is his second movie and this time Diego Luna addresses the topic of migration and the question of being uprooted, something that has always fascinated him. He shares this interest with his childhood friend Gael García Bernal, his sidekick in Y tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) and long-time partner. They founded Canana Films together, the production house that brought us films like Sin Nombre, and Ambulante, an annual itinerant documentary festival that travels through different regions in Mexico. In 2014, García Bernal put it this way, “Cinema is perhaps of the few forms of expressions that are capable of giving its own identity to migratory people. Otherwise, they disappear.”
Ceniza en la boca (Ashes) is created in this perspective as a Mexican-Spanish co-production with Anna Díaz, Adriana Paz, and Laura Gómez.
