From Ricardo de Montreuil, director of La Mujer de mi Hermano and the writer of Voces Inocentes comes Mancora, a road trip film full of love and a bunch of sex, drugs and guilty feelings that just showed at the New York International Latino Film Festival. Mancora tells the story of Santiago (Jackson Day) , a 21 year- old limeño who was just fired from his job as a result of hitting his boss. On top of that, Santiago finds himself in a hole of depression and guilt after his famous singer father commits suicide. He then decides to travel to Mancora, a coastal resort town in northern Peru, to escape the city’s cold winter. However, days before Santi’s trip, his beautiful Spanish artist/photographer step-sister Ximena (Elsa Pataky) and her young “gringo” (actually US Latino) husband Iñigo (Enrique Murciano), (who has a better Spanish than most of us put together) come from New York to visit him. At Ximena’s insistance, Santi’s trip becomes a forced family reunion…and then an affair between the step brothers, not surprisingly making the impulsive Iñigo full of jealousy and rage in the paradise of Mancora.
Just like La Mujer de Mi Hermano, in Mancora de Montreuil uses the same theme of infidelity within a family, and partially the same plot. (In La Mujer de mi Hermano, Zoe (Barbara Mori), cheats on husband Ignacio (Christian Meier) with his brother Gonzalo (Manolo Cardona) Gonzalo is a provocative and sexy artist, to be precise, a painter, just like Ximena in this film). For some strange reason, in Mancora, Santi is always having sex when his life is just about to change, and always for the worst, until he realizes that the world is not what’s wrong, but…surprise! It’s himself.
Mancora guarantees you will feel at home, not because of the nudity or the step-brothers’ affair, but because of the beautiful landscape, which even though it’s Peruvian, it would make any Latino, from a Dominican to a Brazilian, feel at home too. All of this as a result of the good camera work, and the coast life which makes perfect harmony with the great soundtrack. There’s also a big diversity of Latin and Afro-Caribbean cultures represented in the cast of the story, which shows a different side of Peru that we usually don’t see. Full of great symbolism, the story will take you to a mountain of emotions and drama with high peaks of adrenaline and anxiety that makes for a good-looking, enjoyable film.