Spanish with English subtitles
Filmmaker Gian Cassini explores his family’s history of violence, focusing on his father, a Tijuana hitman.
In 2010, Mexican newspapers reported the murder of El Jimmy, a small-time hitman in Tijuana. For most readers, it was just another casualty of the drug wars. But for Cassini, it was personal—El Jimmy was his estranged father.
In Comala, Cassini acts as a private investigator, delving into the mysteries of his father’s life and death. Raised by a single mother in Monterrey with only sporadic contact with his father, who had another family, Cassini starts searching for answers after El Jimmy’s murder, tracking down half-siblings and other relatives across Mexico and the United States.
Press
“A thread of toxic male lying, cheating, stealing, abandoning and violence connects the scattered pieces director Gian Cassini assembles into the family quilt of Comala. (...) It’s a quietly engrossing use of the documentary form to probe issues seemingly passed from one generation to another, leaving children both fatherless and oft-inclined to repeat that missing person’s errors.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety
“In different hands, these plotlines could be sensationalized. But Cassini shapes the material into something more profound than the average true-crime story. He studies how generational patterns of machismo create dynamics for broken relationships and what that means for the women and children left behind. The film explores how to heal family wounds and turn a dark past into a more promising future.” – Thom Powers, TIFF Progammer
About the Director
Gian Cassini is a documentary filmmaker based in Monterrey, Mexico. He is a writer, editor, producer, and director of short films and television series. Comala (2021) marks his feature debut.
Notes on Film
“When I decided to make this film, we as Mexican citizens were starting to feel used to the abrupt violence that occurred in our country because of the Mexican Drug War. And when I met again with my father’s family after years of not having seen them, I recognized some of the root problems of this war that our government wasn’t talking about. So I wanted to put those problems over the table so that the average citizen could identify them and discuss them. And I thought that the most powerful way to do that was to portray them through an intimate universe in which everyone can relate to them: families. And by taking this approach the duty transformed into another one where I wanted to give each family member the space and time to speak. That was the reason that kept motivating me through the years to arrive at this final stage where the film is released.
When I started this film I was coming from a fiction background. I knew nothing about documentary filmmaking or the documentary industry. Through these years thanks to the labs in which Comala participated I had the chance to meet amazing non-fiction filmmakers and writers who have taught me the importance of, even by doing something so intimate about oneself, opening your eyes to what is happening around and the relevance of giving to underrepresented people the chance to be heard and seen and the beauty of it. So currently I want to stay here in non-fiction and consider myself a documentary filmmaker.
For the first years of shooting, I financed the film with my own money, which wasn’t enough, so that made the journey extended more than I was expecting. It also felt like I had to keep the emotions that my investigation was bringing the level of the stage of the production. So it frustrated me because I couldn’t see an end and I wanted to move on. But at the last stage of the shooting, the contrary happened: I took my time watching the whole journey from the outside and decided what else I needed to make the message stronger, and then I went to shoot it and add it to the film.”
– Gian Cassini, Director
