In an appeal to a lost friend, a first-person narrator raves about their shared future after the friend returns: fancy cars, big guns and submissive women. The fantasy soars like a bird over the Sierra, a digitally modulated landscape whose holes and glitches show that there is something basically wrong here. Game over, the playfulness turns deadly serious, the friend is in the hands of drug cartel killers. Fictional but close to reality, the film associatively assembles pop-cultural audio, video and gaming material from the internet to describe the intoxicated fascination with a perversely fetishised, violence-glorifying winner mentality. This idolisation comes up against a dead end on a web portal showing real video recordings of bestial brutality. Disarmingly clear and incredibly poignant, Oscar Asán analyses how ruthlessly a cartel divides the people of Culiacán into murderers and murder victims.

André Eckardt