Screened as part of NZIFF 2014

Club Sándwich 2013

Directed by Fernando Eimbcke

This charming Mexican film is both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny as the relationship between a holidaying 15-year-old boy and his loving mother is tested by the arrival on the scene of a girl his own age.

Mexico In Spanish with English subtitles
82 minutes DCP

Director, Screenplay

Producers

Christian Valdelièvre
,
Jamie B. Ramos

Photography

María Secco

Editor

Mariana Rodríguez

Production designer

Eugenio Caballero

Art director

Canek Saemisch

Costume designer

Andrea Manuel

Sound

Lena Esquenazi

With

María Renée Prudencio (Paloma)
,
Lucio Giménez Cacho (Héctor)
,
Danae Reynaud Romero (Jazmín)
,
Leonel Tinajero (Jazmín’s father)
,
Caroline Politi (nurse)
,
Enrique Arreola (taxi driver)

Festivals

Toronto
,
San Sebastián 2013; Rotterdam
,
San Francisco 2014

Awards

Best Director, San Sebastián International Film Festival 2013

Elsewhere

In his latest super-slow-burning comedy, Fernando Eimbcke (Duck Season) pinpoints the shifts in a teenage boy’s intimacy with his mother as he takes his first awkward steps into the uncharted waters of intimacy elsewhere. Chubby 15-year-old Héctor and his 30-something single mother Paloma are on holiday together, lolling about in a torpor of companionable boredom. They have the off-season resort to themselves until a strange couple intrude with their 16-year-old daughter, Jazmín. She immediately sets her sights on Héctor. In Eimbcke’s patented deadpan style, Héctor and Jazmín have bewilderingly little to say to each other, though something’s definitely stirring between them. Eimbcke has comic timing down to a beat, and Paloma has a way of turning up precisely when Héctor would rather she didn’t. The beauty of Club Sándwich is how delicately it traces her conflicting emotions and her wavering determination to withdraw gracefully.

“The essence of evocative simplicity… Eimbcke seems to have set out to make a minimalist film with maximum pathos, as befits the accumulation of tiny actions that a loving mom is well placed to observe and feel deeply.” — Rob Nelson, Variety