Screened as part of NZIFF 2019

Midnight Family 2019

Directed by Luke Lorentzen

With visceral immediacy and an unerring sense of compassion, documentarian Luke Lorentzen places us in the passenger seat of a family-run ambulance on the chaotic streets of Mexico City.

Mexico / USA In Spanish with English subtitles
81 minutes DCP

Rent

Director/Photography/Editor

Producers

Kellen Quinn
,
Luke Lorentzen
,
Daniela Alatorre
,
Elena Fortes

Music

Los Shajatos

With

Juan Ochoa
,
Fer Ochoa
,
Josué Ochoa
,
Manuel Hernández

Festivals

Sundance
,
New Directors/New Films
,
San Francisco
,
Hot Docs 2019

Awards

Special Jury Award for Cinematography (US Documentary)
,
Sundance Film Festival 2019

Elsewhere

In Mexico City, the government provides fewer than 45 public ambulances to service a population of nine million. Picking up the slack are a large array of private ambulance companies, whose pay checks depend on arriving at the scene of the emergency before anyone else. In this riveting portrait, documentarian Luke Lorentzen straps us in the passenger seat with the Ochoa family, a ragtag unit of emergency responders who make their living transporting the injured to local hospitals and then tactfully negotiating for compensation.

Led by Juan, the family’s teenage son (and most passionate paramedic), the Ochoa’s are forced to navigate a slew of nightly stresses, which include high-speed races with competing ambulances, extortion from corrupt local cops and the constant dice-roll of picking up patients who may be too impoverished to pay for the service.

By playing ride-along with a family in their own financial quagmire, Lorentzen embroils the viewer in a chewy moral tension, in which the audience’s investment can quickly lead to conflicting emotions whenever an accident comes crackling through the radio. While never foregrounding a political position, Lorentzen (the film’s director, producer, cinematographer and editor) offers an essential document of the messy ethics of healthcare privatisation, where financial incentives start to distort our moral imperatives. — JF

“Thrilling throughout, occasionally heartbreaking, and sometimes even darkly comedic, Midnight Family… is a modern day parable about… the corruption that takes root where governmental oversight used to be.” — Andrew Parker, The Gate