Sundance 2023: Heroic, Scrapper, Sorcery | Festivals & Awards

For instance, David Zonana’s “Heroic,” a sharp, incisive anti-war film, is the kind of searing storytelling that shocks your consciousness. In it, Luis (Santiago Sandoval Carbajal) enrolls in the Heroic Military College with the hopes of supporting his girlfriend and helping his ailing mother receive medical insurance. But he soon discovers the toxic root that upholds the foundation of this institution, which is physically situated in the heavy stone surroundings of Aztec architecture.

For Luis, the sheen first dims when his sergeant, Eugenio Sierra (Fernando Cuautle), offers an opening monologue to the platoon. While we’ve seen this scene play out plenty of times in other war flicks— so many filmmakers rip off Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” by employing the device of a foul-mouth, hot-headed sergeant dehumanizing his soldiers—Zonana takes a different route when Cuautle delivers the same kind of speech with a forced smile. The result is chilling. 

That isn’t to say Zonana isn’t influenced by Kubrick, a cheeky reference to “Eyes Wide Shut” makes as much clear, as does the narrative’s retooling of the army as a cultish entity whose influence works so overtly, you nearly believe it’s fake. There are allusions to graphic sexual violence, done mostly through the film’s shocking soundscape. TW: there is also a vicious initiation scene involving an animal. But mostly, “Heroic” thrives on the surreal, by way of both Luis’ deeply felt, haunting nightmares, and on a scene, whereby Luis is recruited to invade a home, that speaks to the psychological chaos raging within Luis’ heart. 

That disorder surges through every audacious cut by editor Oscar Figueroa Jara, every jarring composition by director of photography Carolina Costa—which rips open the themes of colonialism, poverty and exploitation—hurtling us toward a final breathtaking shot that establishes Zonana’s “Heroic” as the boldest swing against an institution that we’ve seen in quite some time.

In writer/director Charlotte Regan’s “Scrapper,” a tender coming-of-age story, a young girl, Georgie (Lola Campbell), lives alone in a London flat. Georgie’s mother has just died. Grieving and left to her own devices, she doesn’t attend school. In fact, she and her friend spend their days pilfering bikes to sell on the side. Georgia is resourceful: To evade family services she asks a local shop owner to record phrases she can use in phone calls to fake an uncle named Winston Churchill. As smart as Georgie is she knows this can’t last. Someone will discover the truth.