As I sit down on a sunny Sutton Place terrace to talk to Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith, the directors of the excellent Mexican documentary Presumed Guilty, Hernández pulls out his iPhone and snaps my picture.
“It’s counter-journalism,” he says with a laugh moments later, he’s switching to flawless French to speak to a passing writer. Catching me staring, he explains “I lived in Montréal for three years I studied law at McGill. I came here running away from Mexico and found people who gave me the tools to go back.”
Presumed Guilty is the product of those tools, the record of Hernández and partner Layda Negrete’s attempt to help a young Mexican named José Antonio Zúñiga Rodriguez appeal his murder conviction. Hernández brought video cameras to the retrial, the better to build a record of the process.
Watching audiences embrace the film at TIFF has been overwhelming. “Who’s gonna like this subtitled film, in Spanish?” Hernández recalls. “Nobody’s gonna care!”
Co-director Smith (The English Surgeon), who came on to shape the footage into a more cinematic documentary, believes otherwise. “The message is that people can do something,” he says. “He never started out with a film in mind he started out with an idea to document something with a camera.”
As the completed film shows, Hernández’s footage became more than just a document it was ultimately used as evidence in Zúñiga Rodriguez’s appeal. It’s a remarkable accomplishment – and now, the challenge facing the filmmakers is getting it on Mexican screens.
“Something that really would help is international attention,” he says. “Because Mexicans pay a lot of attention to that. Someone might decide to take the risk at home if they see that this was a success here, they might think, ‘oh, it can be a success at home.'”
“Being here,” Smith says, “people writing about it, people seeing it, the ripples move up the chain into government, and all that is enormously important.”
They also want to make sure I’ve visited the film’s website.
“We have 1400 members in our cause to film every trial in Mexico,” Hernández says. “It did. We had 400 more members after our screening here. I was touched, it was amazing.”
Presumed Guilty screens tomorrow (Saturday) at 4 pm at Jackman Hall.
