LFF Dispatch #5: It Takes a Village in Fernando Eimbcke's Social Realist Charmer Moscas

FLIES / Moscas 

(Fernando Eimbcke, 2026, Mexico, 102 minutes) 

"For a child, playing is a deeply serious matter. Children don’t need poetic dialogue or images; they are poetic in their very existence."--Fernando Eimbcke

Fernando Eimbcke certainly took his time following up Duck Season. His debut arrived in 2004, and here he is with the spiritual sequel 22 years later. Then again, he wrote the first draft of the screenplay 25 years ago. Not until he joined forces with novelist Vanesa Garnica was he able to get it right.

To prepare, I set out to rewatch his first film, also in black and white, but it isn't available to stream with English subtitles, and my Spanish comprehension isn't all it could be. I checked every possible streaming site, including foreign ones, and settled on Russia's Ok.ru, which offers an unsubtitled version (I later found another unsubtitled one on YouTube). 

Fortunately, it isn't necessary to watch the earlier film to appreciate the latest, since they have little in common other than the setting and the black and white. Since Mubi picked up Flies after its Berlin Film Festival premiere, where it won the Ecumenical award, I hope they'll also pick up his debut. 

Right: Duck Season, aka Temporada de Patos

Set in and around a brutalist Mexico City apartment complex located next to a hospital, his playful, visually inventive take on social realism begins with a buzzing fly waking up Olga (The Chambermaid's invaluable Teresita Sánchez). She does everything she can to shoo it toward an open window, but it just won't go. 

Taciturn and slow-moving, Olga is a curmudgeon, but like most Eimbcke characters, she contains multitudes. When a couple in the unit above indulges in noisy sex while she's watching TV, she doesn't pound on the ceiling with a broomstick, but stops to listen before turning up the volume.

When she interacts with the world outside, however, she always has some kind of complaint. It doesn't help that she's been feeling poorly, so she visits a podiatrist about her foot pain, hoping for a quick fix, but the doctor tells Olga she needs nail surgery. Unfortunately, it costs 3,000 pesos she doesn't have, so she tacks up signs around the complex advertising a room for rent for family members of patients. The larger the party, the higher the charge. 

A day laborer with a wife in the cancer ward spots one of Olga's signs and makes arrangements to rent the room. He has a few pesos to his name, but not a lot. Eimbcke and Garnica, who prioritize the present, provide no details about his background, other than to suggest that he's from a smaller town. 

Tulio (sympathetic newcomer Hugo Ramirez) is polite and respectful, seemingly the perfect guest, while Olga is anything but the perfect host, sniffing, "I don't want to hear anything about your sick relative." There's another problem: Tulio has a nine-year-old son, Cristian (fellow newcomer Bastián Escobar, a wily, spirited presence who never seems to be acting), and he can't afford the landlady's rate for two guests, so he sneaks Cristian in to the flat late at night and sneaks him out early in the morning. 

Estela's health is so precarious that she can't have visitors, and children aren't allowed at all. At night, father and son gaze longingly at what they believe to be her hospital room window, waiting for her fortunes to improve. 

Cristian is, for the most part, a happy-go-lucky kid, but he misses his mom just as much as his dad, and tries to communicate with her using the flashlight she gave him. He also writes "mommy" in the grime on the guest room window, something Olga notices when she starts to suspect that Tulio is hiding something.

Left to his own devices while his dad takes care of business, Cristian explores the neighborhood. A cop catches him peeing behind a tree, but the kid does a runner. He'll spend the rest of the film trying to evade an authority figure Eimbcke depicts from Cristian's low-to-the-ground eye view, suggesting that the cop is some sort of hulking, lumbering monster. 

One of the defining features of Eimbcke's work is the way characters look through or are reflected in shiny surfaces. It isn't the same as breaking the fourth wall, since they're looking at something other than the camera in the context of the narrative. In Duck Season, they gaze into an oven and at a TV screen; in Flies, it's an arcade game screen and convenience store mirror. 

Just as the teens in Duck Season play a football video game with great enthusiasm, Cristian is obsessed with the Space Invaders-like arcade game Cosmic Defenders. When it comes to his mom, he puts his faith in his dad, who pays her bills as best he can, and the medical team trying to help her get better. 

He's just a kid, and there's nothing he can do, but when he plays the game, he's in control. As he vaporizes aliens, it's as if he were vaporizing the cancer cells invading Estela's body. The 2-bit game with its high-energy synth soundtrack serves as a sort of score, lending the film a 1980s feel, though Flies is set in the era of personal computers and cellphones.

With money running low, Tulio looks for work that will extend their time in the city, but when Olga spots the two eating lunch at a diner, she searches his suitcase and finds children's clothes, confirming her suspicion that Tulio has been hiding the kid from her. The next time they meet, she confronts him. "I let you into my home and this is how you repay me," she barks before demanding more money and ordering them to leave in two days. If they don't, she threatens to call the police. Tulio agrees to her terms before taking a temporary job that will leave Cristian alone with the curmudgeon. 

Before he leaves, Tulio sets Cristian up with a cellphone. The boy does his best to avoid Olga by befriending vendors and shop keepers with whom he makes trades, and all of whom treat him with kindness, even if he tries their patience with his rambunctiousness. When he finds five pesos on the ground, he goes to town on Cosmic Defenders, racking up a high score, and when he finds that he can play the game on his phone, he struggles to tear himself from it.

When he isn't playing the game, he tries to figure out how to sneak a pair of slippers, which he pronounces "sleepers," to his mom (the Spanish word is zapatilla or pantufla). He can't do it on his own, especially with that annoying cop buzzing around, so he devises a plan that leads him to Isaac (Duck Season's pizza delivery man Enrique Arreola), a kindly laundry worker with whom he also plays Cosmic Defenders. More importantly, Isaac offers to bring the slippers to Estela, while cautioning that it could get him fired. 

Cristian next goes to work on the female security workers who decide which visitors can and cannot enter the hospital. Despite his formidable charm offensive, they refuse to let him in, since they could get fired, too, but they offer to find his mom, so he'll know exactly which room she's staying in. 

Without saying a word, Olga watches the boy come and go, feining disinterest as she plays Sudoku, but he crosses a line when he makes a mess in the bedroom. She orders him to clean it up, which is fair, but it doesn't scare him away. Though she insists he stay in the room when in her home, he sneaks out to watch TV after she falls asleep. She catches him in the act, and shoos him away, but not before he swipes a few pesos to play Cosmic Defenders. 

Slowly, but surely, Olga starts to warm up to the kid. I saw it coming from a mile away, but that doesn't make the wearing down of her resistance any less satisfying as she starts to see the situation more clearly: Cristian needs help, and she has the means to provide it. She's also lonely as hell. 

Soon, she's treating him to lunch and plotting how to get the slippers to his mom. They also find they have a few things in common, but I won't spoil the rather amusing surprise. All the while, Eimbcke also avoids specific details about her background, other than to suggest she might have had a son once, which helps to explain her resistance to such a likeable young man. 

It isn’t until late in the proceedings that Olga finally cracks a smile. As an actress, Sánchez can look exceptionally dowdy and downcast, but she has the kind of smile that makes her entire countenance appear beatific. Olga even shares with Cristian her love of cha-cha-chá music, revealing the kind of person she might have been once before disappointment and delusionment took over. 

Mostly, she does what she can to connect Cristian with his mom. As he faces the fact that she might not get better, Eimbcke turns to magical realism in a way that echoes Poltergeist and Videodrome, but in a much more dreamy, benevolent way. Suffice to say: Cosmic Defenders is involved. What might just be another arcade game in another film plays a thematic role here. 

The indomitable fly returns at the end, and this time, Olga leaves it alone.

Of the films I saw at this year's London Film Festival, including two gala premieres, Flies was the most low-key. There was no hype, no lines filled with punters clamoring to get in, and no red carpets at Royal Festival Hall. It was also the funniest, most touching, and least ponderous. Granted, I was thrilled to see that Eimbcke had followed up Duck Season after all these years, even if the characters are different, but there were probably plenty of festivalgoers unfamiliar with it, not least since it's become so difficult to see in English. 

A delight from start to finish, Flies ranks among my favorite Mexican films of the 21st-century–all set in a Mexico City that proves alternately foreboding and welcoming–along with Alejandro Gerber Bicecci's Dead Man's Switch and Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, both also shot in luminous black and white. In all three beautifully-acted features, working class people take center stage. If they don’t necessarily triumph at the end, they’re neither broken nor bowed as their directors imbue them with the dignity and complexity they deserve.

And in Bastián Escobar’s Cristian, Eimbcke introduces a lovable scamp for the ages, just as Teresita Sánchez proves why she's one of Mexico's finest and most nimble performers. It's a worthy father-son successor to David Fortune's Color Book and even Vittorio De Sica's immortal Bicycle Thieves.

There are no more screenings of Flies at LFF, which ends tonight, and nor are any Seattle screenings scheduled, but it plays Portland's Latin American Film Festival, which begins today, on Nov 18. Considering that Fernando Eimbcke's fourth feature, Olmo (also cowritten with Vanesa Garnica), was released in the US in August, Flies probably won't see release until 2027. One way or the other, I'll update this post when I have more information. 

Images from Variety (Hugo Ramirez and Bastián Escobar), IMDb (Daniel Miranda, Diego Cataño, Danny Perea, and Enrique Arreola), Moviepilot (Ramirez and Escobar), and IONCINEMA (Escobar and Teresita Sánchez).