Filmmaker Statement

When the MeToo era seems to have gone out of fashion because "everything is in peace" and "justice has been done", I stop to look inward, to see what really happened in my country and in Latin America, and I realize that it is nothing like what Hollywood portraits, where the perpetrators of violence were persecuted and brought to justice. Here, those who were persecuted and punished were the ones who dared to raise their voices. Definitely, it was never just about one man, but about a whole system, a culture, and so far, I have not seen any audiovisual product that talks about it, about the culture of silence. I am sorry to say it, but "the bad guys of the story" are us, who continue to cover up rapists and help them to silence the whistleblowers. In Mexico at least, we bathed for a couple of months in their tears when their funds for filming were temporarily threatened and they lived an illusion of lost success, but, as soon as MeToo went out of fashion, the women who denounced disappeared from the map and the rapists flourished, waking up from a nightmare where they did not learn anything and only played victims for a while, just like their accomplices. The reality in Latin America has to come to the light. Neither restorative justice nor any other exists in this country has been done, few people found out about what happened and even fewer people cared, especially if it did not affect them directly. During our brief MeToo, we did see a union among women, but the biggest wave was the enormous amount of people who revictimized the complainants fighting for nothing to change, and when it was "over", they all took care of wiping these women off the map and implemented minimal measures just for show. Yes, there is still a lot of violence in the sets, the women who denounced lost, I do not know of a single case of success, hundreds are still legally silenced, hundreds or thousands of others quit the cinema, frustrated and tired of fighting so hard just for nothing to change; the few defendants who have a little shame, keep a low profile today, few asked for genuine apologies, and the wounds are still open and maybe with time they will heal, but I honestly do not think I will see it. Thus is born "A very nice guy", because our MeToo, was more like a "Nothing happened here", 'cause at the end everyone said: "come on!, but he's such a nice guy!" And as my friend Laura says: If you have an industry, in which the professional value is based on the mistreatment of the other person instead of the real value of the work, you are building a violent environment. I invite you to look inward and stop pretending that "nothing happened".