Moctezuma-Grau. Descendencia mortal

Is Kikol Grau, this film’s director, somehow related to Joan Grau, the Catalan who accompanied Hernán Cortés on his “conquest” of Mexico and married one of Moctezuma’s daughters? Using this as a premise, the filmmaker builds an enigmatic artefact, halfway between personal indignation and savage parody, which could be the last word when it comes to Hispanic self-fiction. Filmmaker Jorge Grau and Albin Grau, one of Nosferatu’s producers, come forward, and we travel from inner Catalonia to the millennial Mexico, through many audiovisual genres, in what constitutes a stream of images that are both stunning and hilarious. From reality show to a cinephile’s documentary, from historic coverage to reconstructed fiction, from hard work to appropriation, Moctezuma-Grau transforms what appears to begin as a search for identity in a thriller-and-terror film that goes beyond all of that: a no-fiction that poses its own questions. (Gijón International Film Festival)