Page - 146 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

146 | Baldassare Scolari can she bear to live in the same place as the murderers of her own family, friends and neighbors? In the last scene, we see Aida, who is now working again as a primary school teacher, as she had done before the war, looking at the faces of the murderers during a school performance – that is, looking at people who were capable of the most cruel and inhuman acts and are now happily and lovingly watching their children. Here the children, eternal symbols of innocence, there the beasts, who no longer seem like beasts, but are like normal fathers. The exchange of looks is wonderfully staged here: the men’s brief, fleeting glances at Aida reveal that they would like to forget but cannot, because she, the survivor, is there. Aida is their memorial, the one who makes it impossible to forget and who, despite everything, still appears able to believe in the possibility of reconciliation, because humans, the film seems to tell us, are not born as beasts, but become beasts when they are fed with hatred, racism and brutality. Aida has returned because the children of those who have become beasts are not to be blamed and have the right to grow up in a world worth living in. Another film that deals with murder, cruelty and brutality is Michael Franco’s Nuevo Order (New Order, MX/FR 2020), set in the near future. In reaction to a popular uprising, a coup d’état is taking place in Mexico, dur- ing which the corrupt military and the no less corrupt political and econom- ic elite do not hesitate to use any means available to oppress and exploit the population. In the society shown here, almost all individuals – insurgents, common soldiers, generals, politicians, poor and rich – act only out of pure greed and egoism. In several interviews, the director states he was inspired by works such as A Clockwork Orange (UK/US 1971) by Stanley Kubrick, George Orwell’s 1984 and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (UK/US 2006). Especially in comparison with Children of Men, however, the film’s weak- nesses become apparent. The quality of Cuarón’s film lies in, among oth- er things, the fact that it does not “anthropologize” political violence, but rather depicts it as the result of a complex power network in which both ideological attitudes and economic-political interests play important roles. Cuarón critically examines state and “revolutionary” violence but does not simply present it as an expression of a universal human inclination to bru- tality. Franco’s film, by contrast, is a superficial and unintended caricature of the Hobbesian state of nature, where all are homo homini lupus, that is, wolves exploiting each other. In Mexico, the film was rightly criticized for the stereotypical portrayal of the rich and poor, which ultimately only reproduces the classism and racism against which the director claims to www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 143–148