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Mexico’s official entry to the Oscars, “Sujo,” made a sweep of the 22nd Morelia Int’l Film Festival (Ficm), winning the festival’s Ojo Awards for Best Film, Director and Screenplay.

Co-helmer-scribes Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, whose debut pic “Identifying Features” won a couple of Sundance awards and took the Best International Feature prize at the Gotham Awards in 2021, also snagged the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema with “Sujo,” their sophomore feature, in January.

Hailed by Variety as an “optimistic alternative to violent drug war movies,” the poignant coming-of-age story revolves around the impact of drug cartels on the youth. The tale follows young Sujo (played by Kevin Uriel Aguilar Luna and Juan Jesús Varela) who grows up surrounded by their violence. When his father, a sicario (hired assassin), is killed, he becomes a target but Sujo’s intrepid aunt rescues him.

Sujo’s win caps...

Mexico has picked Sundance Film Festival winner Sujo to represent the country at the 2025 Oscars in the Best International Feature category. The drama from Identifying Features directors Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez premiered at Sundance this year, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema. It is currently doing the festival tour and will screen in San Sebastian and the London Film Festival this fall.

The coming-of-age story focuses on the titular Sujo, the son of a small-town cartel sicario who is orphaned when his father is murdered as a traitor. Under constant threat of death — the cartels traditionally kill male heirs of assassinated members lest they grow up to avenge their fathers — Sujo goes into hiding in the mountains, living in isolation with only his aunts and two young cousins for company. But as a young man, Sujo, played by Identifying Features actor Juan Jesús Varela, drifts...

Mexico has selected the drama film “Sujo” as its entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 2025 Academy Awards. The movie tells the story of a young man growing up in a small Mexican town threatened by cartel violence.

“Sujo” follows the life of its title character after his cartel member father is murdered. Sujo is raised by his aunt in the countryside but grows up surrounded by poverty and danger. As a teen, Sujo gets drawn into the local drug gang. He later tries to escape his violent past. The film explores how destiny and the cycle of cartel activity impact Mexico.

The movie from directors Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Juan Jesús Varela plays the adult Sujo, supported by Yadira Pérez, Alexis Varela and others. Rondero, Valadez, and producers Diana Casarreal, Jewerl Keats Ross,...

Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s Mexico-set drama Sujo has been selected as Mexico’s Oscar submission in the best international feature film category.

‘Sujo’: Sundance Review

The Forge has scheduled a November 29 theatrical release in select US and Canadian markets on the coming-of-age drama about the son of a slain cartel hitman who, now a young man after growing up in hiding, must reckon as a young man with destiny as his father’s legacy catches up with him. Juan Jesús Varela stars

Sujo premiered in Sundance where it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Drama. It...

Sujo, which won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema following its world premiere there earlier this year, has been selected to represent Mexico in the 2025 Oscar race for Best International Feature Film.

Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s drama centers on Sujo, the beloved son of a small-town cartel gunman who narrowly escapes death when his father is murdered. His aunt takes him in and raises him in the isolated countryside amidst hardship, poverty and the constant peril associated with his identity.

When Sujo enters his teens a rebelliousness awakens in him and he joins the local cartel. As a young man (Juan Jesús Varela), he attempts to make his life anew, away from the violence of his hometown. But when his father’s legacy catches up with him, he will come face-to-face with what seems to be his destiny.

Yadira Pérez, Alexis Varela, Sandra Lorenzano,...

The Forge has bulked up its arthouse slate of major festival winners and acquired North American rights to Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Sujo. The company plans to support the film with a full awards campaign.

Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s Mexico-set drama premiered in Park City in January when it won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Drama.

The feature will participate in a number of upcoming festivals including San Sebastian’s Horizontes Latinos strand spotlighting films from Latin America and AFI Latin American Film Festival, both of which take place later this month.

The Forge will release...

Premiering in January to a Sundance Dramatic World Cinema Grand Jury Prize, “Sujo” from “Identifying Features” filmmakers Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez has expanded its global reach, closing multiple distribution deals forged by Paris-based Alpha Violet, who heads international distribution.

Paris-based Damned Films has picked up the title for France while Twelve Oaks Pictures, Trigon Films, Cinobo and McF Megacom have swooped on the film for Spain, Switzerland, Greece and Cyprus and Ex-Yugoslavia territories respectively, with Auckland’s Vendetta Films securing rights to the title for the Australia and New Zealand markets.

The sales outfit, who co-produced the title alongside Valadez and Romero’s EnAguas Cine, Mexico’s Corpulenta and California’s Silent R Management, have also negotiated a TV deal with HBO Europe on top of closing a recent sale to Mexico and Latin American via Cinepolis. UTA is assisting with the domestic U.S. market.

“It’s been...

New York’s Museum of the Moving Image has revealed the full lineup for First Look 2024, the 13th edition of the festival that showcases “new and innovative international cinema,” both fiction and nonfiction.

The festival, set to run March 13-17 at MoMI in Queens, will kick off with Sujo, the drama directed by Mexican filmmakers Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez that won the Grand Jury Prize in World Cinematic Competition at Sundance. The vitality of Latin American cinema is reflected in another film in the First Look 2024 lineup, The Echo, directed by Salvadoran-born and Mexico-based filmmaker Tatiana Huezo. Scroll for the full roster of films.

‘Gasoline Rainbow’

First Look 2024 will close on Sunday, March 17 with Gasoline Rainbow, a “rambunctious coming-of-age road movie” directed by brothers Bill and Turner Ross, their follow up to their acclaimed 2020 film Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets – winner of the True Vision Award at the True/False festival,...

A yearly highlight of New York (or American) programming, the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look will return on March 13 with an opening-night screening of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s Sujo, close on March 17 with Bill and Turner Ross’ Gasoline Rainbow, and in the intervening days combine programming of recent cutting-edge highlights with in-person talks and seminars.

First Look’s fixture “Working on It” will run between March 13 and 15, offering “a laboratory for works in progress and dialogues about process, bringing together festival guests, filmmakers, students, writers, and the general public.” Meanwhile, writers and editors from Reverse Shot “will continue discussions begun in last year’s Emerging Critics Workshop throughout the festival.”

So says MoMI’s Curator of Film Eric Hynes:

“Now in its 13th year, First Look has carved out a unique, and we think essential, place in New York’s film and cultural landscape.

The annual Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival has given IndieWire an exclusive “first look” at the lineup.

The 13th annual event, which takes place March 13 through 17 in Astoria, Queens, opens with the New York premiere of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s “Sujo,” which recently took home the Grand Jury Prize, World Cinema Dramatic Competition, at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

The First Look Festival focuses on emerging talents and international voices, with the fest premiering 46 works, including 20 features that represent 21 countries. Highlights include Farhad Delaram’s “Achilles,” Graham Swon’s “An Evening Song (for three voices), and the U.S. premiere of Lois Patiño’s “Samsara.” Zhang Mengqi’s “Self-Portrait: 47 Km 2020,” which won the Award of Excellence winner at the 2023 Yamagata Documentary Festival, will also screen along with Shoghakat Vardanyan’s 2023 IDFA grand prize winner “1489,” the debut for the filmmaker. Returning First Look directors like Michaël Andrianaly...

A film about growing up in your father’s shadow that mostly (and unexpectedly) examines the role of women as community pillars and violence interrupters, Sujo is the compelling new Sundance award-winning feature from Identifying Features team Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez. The father in question Josue (Juan Jesús Varela Hernández) is a sicario, a brutal gang enforcer killed early in the film by his cartel. The first chapter unfolds as young Sujo (Kevin Uriel Aguilar Luna) watches his father conduct business at a distance, purposefully disorienting passages wherein we overhear conversations. Compounding the confusion, when his father doesn’t return home, we witness a chilling scene in which he’s hidden by his aunt Nemesia (Yadira Perez Esteban) when a member of the cartel comes to exact revenge after Sujo’s father killed his son.

The film’s later passages find Nemesia raising Sujo, who spends time as a...

The winner of the World Dramatic competition at Sundance, co-directors Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s understated and essential Mexican drama “Sujo” is one of two films in this year’s lineup (the other being “Ponyboi”) in which children who were given distinctive names by doomed macho dads spend years wondering what those monikers mean. In both cases, the eventual reveal puts a poignant coda on stories of young Latinos struggling to escape the cycle of ignorance and unhealthy behavior that threatens to pull them under.

An optimistic entry in a traditionally brutal genre, “Sujo” is a story about defying gravity. Like Sleeping Beauty — who manages to prick her finger, even after all of the spinning wheels in the kingdom were thought destroyed — or tragic figures from Greek mythology whose fates are dictated by the gods, the title character seems doomed to follow in the footsteps of his father, Josue...

A still from In ‘The Summers’ by Alessandra Lacorazza (Courtesy of Sundance Institute.)

In the Summers took home the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and Porcelain War was named the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary winner at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Sujo and A New Kind of Wilderness were also recognized with Grand Jury Prizes during the awards ceremony held on February 26, 2024 at The Ray Theatre in Park City, Utah.

Daughters, directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, was named the Festival Favorite Award winner and also received the Audience Award: U.S. Documentary.

“This year was especially meaningful to all of us for being the 40th edition of the Sundance Film Festival,” stated Joana Vicente, Sundance Institute CEO. “We congratulate all of our artists in the program this year for their contributions to an incredible slate and Festival experience. Something we were pleasantly surprised by was how...

While there’s still a few days left of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Ferrari, Sundance 2024, Once Within a Time, Four Daughters & More”>including the opportunity to watch many titles from the comfort of your own home, the juries have now handed out their awards. Grand Jury Prizes were awarded to: In The Summers (U.S. Dramatic Competition), Porcelain War (U.S. Documentary Competition), Sujo (World Cinema Dramatic Competition), and A New Kind of Wilderness (World Cinema Documentary Competition).

Check out the full list below and see all of our reviews here.

The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to In The Summers / U.S.A. — On a journey that spans the formative years of their lives, two sisters navigate their loving but volatile father during their yearly summer visits to his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Cast: René Pérez Joglar, Sasha Calle, Lío Mehiel, Leslie Grace, Emma Ramos,...

The human spirit can be remarkably resilient, but humankind’s capacity for violence sadly makes that resilience more necessary than it should be. Fernanda Valadez’s Sujo meditates, ponders and reaches touching heights as it follows the marked son of a dead sicario from childhood to young adulthood as he tries to escape the cycle of violence and death that plague his village and his family.

The movie is another triumph for writer/director Valadez, who made the 2020 Sundance hit Identifying Features with screenwriter Astrid Rondero, who collaborates with him again here, and actor Juan Jesús Varela, who plays the title character from his teenage years on. It captures danger, suspense, tenderness and hope as it considers how someone can escape their apparent destiny.

Set in a rural Mexican village where cartels call the shots and everyone else hopes to live life peacefully, the story follows Sujo and his family.

Early in writer-directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero’s Sujo, the eponymous character (initially played by Kevin Aguilar) faces down the prospect of his own death. Josué (Juan Jesús Varela Hernández), a cartel sicario from Michoacán, Mexico, was branded a traitor and murdered, and now, Sujo, his only son, must be dealt with. The only indication that little Sujo even grasps the danger of the situation is when he wets himself while hiding under a table as a cartel assassin comes calling. But it doesn’t matter to the cartel that the boy is far too young to seek vengeance. What matters is Sujo’s connection to Josué, and that the burden of history and blood is such that it may very well shape him into his father’s son.

In this way, the film concerns itself with legacy and free will. Sujo’s aunt, Nemesia (Yadira Pérez), begs for the child’s life,...

For the larger part of the last two decades, Mexican cinema has been over saturated with hard-to-stomach chronicles of the monstrous drug violence ravaging the country, but no one is approaching such darkness with the layered sensibility and aesthetic poetry of directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero. Proven by their soul-shattering and award-winning previous collaboration, “Identifying Features” (which Valadez directed and Rondero co-wrote), they see the ongoing crisis not for its potential for spectacle or tactless shock value, but for the unspeakable human tragedy that it is.

While “Identifying Features” followed a mother searching for her son, a migrant victim of the horrors, their slightly more hopeful latest, “Sujo,” flips the focus to trace how young men from small, impoverished towns are trapped by the inescapable cycles of violence and become ruthless perpetrators. Here, Valadez and Rondero, now officially co-writing and co-directing, extend their cinematic empathy even to those society...

Ahead of its international bow in World Cinema Dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival, Beverly Hills-based United Talent Agency’s Independent Film Group has pounced on domestic sales representation for the unconventional narco narrative “Sujo,” from “Identifying Features” creators Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez.

UTA joins Paris-based outfit Alpha Violet (“Apples”), which handles international sales as well as co-producing the new Sundance title.

“Alpha Violet is thrilled to continue working with Fernanda and Astrid after the success of ‘Identifying Features.’ Being a larger team to support our filmmakers is fantastic!” Virginie Devesa, co-head of Alpha Violet, told Variety.

Screening within the fest’s World Cinema Dramatic competition, the project tackles inherited identity and the weighty struggles that suffocate cartel communities through the eyes and experiences of a toddler, Sujo, who comes of age having lost parents in a town marred by brutality.

“In Mexico, there’s an immense crisis...

A week after Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela) announces his immigration dreams to his mother Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) — a simple plan, consisting of alighting to Arizona with his best friend Rigo (Armando García), getting a job, and not much else — the young Mexican teenager is gone. Months later, the boys have yet to announce their arrival in the United States, nor have they returned to the landlocked state of Guanajuato. They, like so many before and likely after them, have simply gone missing, and in a country where such a tragedy is all too common, it falls on the people they’ve left behind to figure out what has happened to their beloved boys.

Fernanda Valadez’s feature directorial debut “Identifying Features” takes that seemingly tear-jerking concept — one beset by knotty bureaucratic issues, painful language barriers, and the sense of further danger around every bend — and turns it into an artfully...

"Don't ask those questions in public. You don't know who's listening." Kino Lorber has unveiled an official US trailer for an indie mother drama from Mexico titled Identifying Features, also known as Sin Señas Particulares (No Particular Signs) in Spanish. And the German title is Was Geschah mit Bus 670?, which just translates to What Happened to Bus 670?. The film follows Mercedes Hernandez as a mother who travels across Mexico in search for her son who authorities say died while trying to cross the border into the United States. "From this simple but urgent premise, director Fernanda Valadez has crafted a lyrical, suspenseful slow burn, equally constructed of moments of beauty and horror, and which leads to a startling, shattering conclusion. Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Audience and Screenplay Awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival." This also stars David Illescas, Juan Jesús Varela, Ana Laura Rodríguez, Laura Elena Ibarra,...

With the first Sundance Film Festival of the new decade wrapping up today, the award winners have been announced. Leading the pack is Minari, which picked up U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic, and Boys State, which was awarded U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. It was also announced that Tabitha Jackson will be the new director of the festival, following John Cooper’s departure.

Check out the full winner list below, along with links to our reviews where available, and return for our wrap-up. See our complete coverage here.

2020 Sundance Film Festival Feature Film Awards

The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary was presented to: Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, for Boys State / U.S.A. — In an unusual experiment, a thousand 17-year-old boys from Texas join together to build a representative government from the ground up.

The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to: Lee Isaac Chung,...