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Los Cabos – Mexico on the Rise: Jorge Leyva

MEXICO CITY — Versatile and fertile, Mexico’s Jorge Leyva’s “My Demons Never Swore Solitude,” a claustrophobic Western with horror beats, is one of the highest-profile of Los Cabos’ Mexico Primero world premieres.

Sneak-peeked and prized in rough-cut at Guadalajara, where Habanero Films took world rights, then glimpsed at the Cannes Film Market, it is set in 1860 at a benighted cabin among mini Monument Valley-like outcrops near to the Arizona border, and stars Manuel Uriza (“Better Call Saul”) as a liquor-guzzling, hallucinating, gold panner convinced that his young wife is cheatin’ on him and unsettled by a vague sensation he’s gone through all this before.

“My Demons” adds to a burgeoning Mexican cannon of movies – think “The Untamed,” “We Are the Flesh” – which proffer metaphors of modern Mexico from the most unlikely, at first glance, of standpoints, here portraying a country lost in a unceasing circle of violence, machismo, revenge, greed and self-delusion.

“A film about a gold digger in 1860 searching for a demon – it couldn’t be anything but a political film,” Leyva commented.

“I live in Sonora, on the border with Arizona. The machismo, violence and greed are nothing but consequences of the same issue: Deep corruption that beats both sides of the border.”

Of upcoming movies, Leyva says he has recently written “Burn The Air,” an urban film about border and adolescence, co-written comedy “She Used My Head as a Revolver” and is about to research another Western, this time contemporary, “No Place to Forgive.”

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