The first day full of activities 21st Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) began with a daring work: the film adaptation of Hurricane seasonthe multi-award-winning novel by Fernanda Melchor.

The film, produced by Woo Films and the Netflix platform, opened the Mexican feature film competition with a media screening and a gala screening. It is one of the most anticipated Mexican productions of the year, not only because it translates into images a book considered the pinnacle of current Mexican literature, but also because this book happens to have the characteristics of being non-adaptable: it is a story that changes its narrative voice, that is told on the page through a swirl of voices and that runs in flowing chapters of a single paragraph, as if made up of mighty rivers.

The director Elisa MillerThe Mexican filmmaker who promoted the adaptation and put her hand up to direct it admitted in a press conference that even when she already owned the rights to the novel, she came to believe that the task was impossible.

“When they spoke to me and told me: It’s a fact, we have the rights, I thought: This is the best call of my life!” I hung up. I came home and grabbed the book. I didn’t sleep when I reread it. I woke up. I called them and told them: No, that’s not possible. ¿Who came up with this? And they told me: Well, you!” confessed the director with a laugh.

Mexican filmmaker Elisa Miller, director of Hurricane seasonduring FICM 2023.

But the desire to pay tribute through visual language was stronger. Elisa Miller, She won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2007 for her short film See rainand also director of the films The pleasure is mine And What is karma’s fault?He shared his passion for the novel.

“It crossed my mind. My desire to adapt comes from the love of the book, written by Fernanda, who seems to me the most virtuous of my generation. When I finished reading it, I thought: That’s Juan Rulfo from my generation, and he’s a woman my age! I have to meet her! I became obsessed. The book penetrated me like a poison or a parasite infecting me. “I had to make the film.”

How do you film hurricanes?

The way it happens in the novel, the film Hurricane season It begins with a violent crime and follows the lives of a handful of characters living in the heat, misery and natural exuberance of La Matosa, a region in Veracruz invented for the novel but in reality there is nothing fictional about it. The facts of the murder are revealed as each of the characters tells their story, but each one’s versions point not to a definitive perpetrator but to a circular hell, an enveloping storm from which no one is safe.

Elisa Miller described the process of adapting the book in painful terms. We had to give up trying to cover everything. “For me, the process of adapting a book is to rip out its literature, the literature must remain outside the script. We must remove everything that can only be said with language.

According to the filmmaker, one of the team’s first exercises was to read the book from a different perspective to achieve a “cinematic extraction.” This rereading consisted of identifying scenes in the novel that were already there and could be translated into visual language. The film then went through several stages of writing and rewriting until the first “painful” decision was made; This means that everything that belongs to the characters’ past is omitted from the script.

“One of the most painful decisions was the decision to tell the present well,” said the filmmaker. » There were many in the previous version Flashbacks And actually that was one of the Netflix notes: What’s wrong with this waterfall? Flashbacks? When we decided to make a film [en lugar de una serie]We knew that not everything would fit. They are different languages, in the cinema it is a language of the present. It was a very advanced decision in the script process to say: Everything that has passed becomes prehistory.

This does not mean that the filmmaker did not leave room for the context of her characters, who are affected by the threats of drug trafficking, machismo, violence and the precarity that the area’s oil wells maintain. “The context is the background,” he explained. “I told them [al equipo]: This is a historical film, it takes place in 2015. It is a very specific, socio-political context, and behind the book is a comprehensive study by Fernanda. The date was very important, even though we didn’t specify it as such in the film. For us there was a linear document with data. But we decided to focus on people. It was a portrait film, you had to be there. Nevertheless, we were very careful to always use the context as a background.

On the visual side, the filmmaker worked with the Ariel-winning cinematographer Maria Secco (The golden cage, I promise you anarchy) to find ways to rescue Fernanda Melchor’s literary style and translate it into images. They decided to use sequence shots to mimic the fluidity with which the novel flows in and out of different chapters and characters’ points of view. They also picked up an idea that the same author had used at various conferences to explain her changes in narrative voice, and which has to do with a fairly famous horror film.

“I think that the camera is to cinema what the narrator is to literature,” explained Elisa, “the narrator’s choice here is where we put the camera.” One of the first questions I asked Fernanda, was, “What’s wrong with your narrator?” Because it’s not an internal dialogue, it’s not an omnipresent narrator, it doesn’t get into the heads of its characters. And then in some conferences she talks about how, for her, her narrator was Pazuzu, the devil of The Exorcist. [En las novelas de Fernanda Melchor] The narrator owns the characters. If the narrator is there, it is because the devil is there. So for María and me this idea was fundamental, because we said that when we enter the chapter of one character or another, what happens is that we own them. The camera was Pazuzu.

The presentation of Hurricane season At FICM 2023 he also stood out for his cast: a group of young debutants, new faces, most of them from the theater, who had never made a film before. Among them are Andrés Cordaz, Paloma Alvamar, Edgar Treviño and Ernesto Melendez.

According to producer Rafael Ley, the making of this film faced various difficulties as Woo Films obtained the rights to the novel before the Covid pandemic. The company only received the necessary financing when it was acquired by Netflix. “Nobody else supports these kinds of films,Hurricane season, Pedro Paramoetc., like them,” he commented.

“My deep gratitude that Fernanda Melchor exists and wrote this book,” said the director. “Without a doubt, a before and after in contemporary Mexican literature.” “We made this film from this place of love.”

Hurricane season Take part in the official selection FICM 2023along with other anticipated Mexican feature films such as: Hit, by Katina Medina Mora with Marina de Tavira and Totem, the film by Lila Avilés chosen to represent Mexico at the next Oscars.