In a small town in Mexico, Emiliano searches for those responsible for his mother’s disappearance. An environmental activist, she opposed the local mining industry. Receiving no help from the police or the justice system, his research leads him to the wealthy Aldama family. Amat Escalante has a habit, when he starts working on the script of a film, of accumulating ideas and arranging them to derive a story that he can then put into images. For the filmmaker, a film is therefore often the reflection of a moment in his life. He specifies: “Lost In The Night owes a lot to the pandemic, to the sudden change in the world: I was able, during this period, to see more films, think more and read these books that I had not taken the time to read until then. Dostoyevsky, for example, and “Les Misérables” by Victor Hugo, a novel that I had never opened because it is ultimately very present in world culture.”

“And when I read it, I understood why it was important within the history of cinema. I also walked a lot, in the mountains, listening to audiobooks. I took notes. I I really wanted to understand the complexity of people, their paradoxes, the good and evil that we all have deep within us – which we find in the characters in the film.”

Lost In The Night is different from Amat Escalante’s previous films, particularly in terms of the characters. The director explains: “Beyond the fact of collaborating with professional actors, which ultimately is not really important, I had never told a story with this social profile – and moreover I had never never been around people like that in life until Narcos, where I had the opportunity to meet a few stars.”