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Winner of the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution, this genre-bender takes an immersive, existential ride deep inside the Mexico City police force.
Teresa and Montoya are partners on the police force and in life. We follow them on the job and listen in as they lament the challenge of working within a corrupt, compromised and mistrusted institution. They also begin making increasingly strange video diaries of their experiences. But what does it really take to be a cop? Dedication, a sense of duty, real courage? Or is what we’re witnessing just a performance, complete with costumes, props and scripts? Somewhere in the middle is where the truth lies.
Across five chapters, acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios (Museum, MIFF 2018) explores the contradictions of law enforcement by referencing then deconstructing all the things we think we know about the police, on screen and off. Blurring the lines between reality and fiction, documentary and drama, this film is as meta as they get – and, with its highly visceral but playful approach to complex questions, A Cop Movie is like no other cop movie that has come before it.
“More like a cop movie written by Jacques Derrida, directed with nods to Wes Anderson and Jean-Luc Godard and then remixed by Abbas Kiarostami in its efforts to tear down the fourth wall.” – Hollywood Reporter