Midnight Family
As there is a shortage of public ambulances in the city of Mexico, a family equips their own vehicle and each night take part in what is a chaotic race fuelled by extreme competition to determine who will be the first responder at the scene of each incoming call for help. One of the highly awarded documentaries of the year, it combines the immediacy of a story on the front line with the fast pace of an action film. All proceeds of the first screening (20/09) will go to humanitatian organisation Mission Anthropos
MEXICO, USA | 2019 | COLOR | DCP | 81΄| SPANISH
In Mexico City there are less than 50 ambulances for a population of 9 million. Certain people, on their own initiative – but with a state licence! – provide at their own expense ambulances and medical tools, hoping to get financial aid from the patients they transfer. The Ochoa family is one of those people, a midnight family. Non verbally narrated, possessing a ubiquitous camera, Luke Lorentzen’s film follows through the darkness of the city the ailing Healthcare and the people whose well-being depends on its absence, appointing them Good Samaritans of a new medieval era.
Filled with death races on urban avenues – which vehicle will get first to its destination? – allnighters in the ambulances, super market visits for canned goods and pushing of the vehicles since fuel, like money, run out, Lorentzen’s documentary gives us a glimpse to a country where its flag still waves (the last shot) but the fundamental things have been forgotten. I.D.
DIRECTOR: Luke Lorentzen
SCREENWRITER Luke Lorentzen
DoP: Luke Lorentzen
MUSIC: Los Shajatos
EDITOR: Luke Lorentzen
LUKE LORENZEN
Awarded documentarist, photographer and editor, with Art History studies in Stanford, as well as director/ producer of ‘Last Chance U’ for Netflix. He lives wandering and filming while ‘Midnight Family’ won a special Jury prize for cinematography at Sundance.
FILMOGRAPHY
2019 Midnight Family
2015 New York Cuts
