Fresh off the Cannes premiere of his new film “Ashes,” Diego Luna joined producers Valerie Delpierre and Luis Salinas at The American Pavilion for IndieWire: In Conversation — “Ashes.” The event featured an expansive conversation about migration, grief, bilingual production, and the challenges of making personal films in the streaming era. Moderated by IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, the panel explored how Luna channelled his own experiences with grief into an adaptation of Brenda Navarro’s novel about family separation and emotional displacement.
“This is hopefully a story about those who travel, but also those who receive,” Luna said, going on to explain that he wanted to expand the canon of immigration films beyond stories about the United States.
“We are so consumed about the relation with the States, and we explain migration always like that,” the “Andor” star said. “Spain has become quite a safe port for Latin American migration.”
For Luna, the political backdrop was secondary to the pathos of the story. “Ashes” examines how children react to loss and how those narratives shift with age and understanding. He explained that losing his own mother when he was two years old informed his portrayal of a child who has to process being abandoned.
“The movie places her in the moment where she realizes the other side of the story,” Luna said of Lucila (Anna Díaz), the child at the center of the story. “She builds her own mythology around the mother abandoning them.”
Luna’s direction has earned the film strong reviews out of the festival, with some critics praising the film’s cultural specificity and handling of sensitive subject matter.
“The tonal subtlety of ‘Ashes,’ which doesn’t undermine its quietly heartbreaking poignancy, showcases an artistic maturity on Luna’s part,” Carlos Aguilar wrote in his IndieWire review. “There’s a sensitivity to his choices that speaks both of an inherent understanding of the characters as a Mexican national (the dialogue and flashes of humor ring natural) and of a humble interest in depicting circumstances that don’t directly affect him but shape the lives of many of his less fortunate compatriots. ‘Ashes’ doesn’t feel like a typical immigration tale, not because of where it takes place, but because of the nuance of emotion that fuels it.”
Watch the complete conversation with Luna, Delpierre, and Salinas in the video above. For our complete programming schedule at The American Pavilion, click here.
