Many of us have closed our eyes and imagined a blunt object traversing Donald Trump’s hideous, grimacing face, but thanks to first-time British filmmaker Sarah Clift, we can now see this feat gloriously realized at the hands of a young Mexican boy. Clift’s short film La Madre Buena (The Good Mother) dramatizes a simple tale of a mother who goes to great lengths to fulfill her child’s simple birthday wish: to have a Donald Trump piñata for his party.
Unfortunately for the doting matriarch, Trump piñatas don’t seem to be readily available in their small town, so she mounts up on a rickety moped and takes to the hills, where a shamanic mountain hermit gives her a life-sized Trump effigy after cleansing it of bad spirits. To close out the stylish five-minute fable, Clift treats us to some gratifying close ups of the piñata’s papier-mâché head being collapsed by repeated blows from the giddy, blindfolded child.
Stylistically La Madre Buena has more than a few echoes of Wes Anderson, with symmetrically framed widescreen cinematography, and a drawn out pacing that revels in awkward silences. Then, of course, there’s the patent absurdity of a humble Mexican woman tooling down country roads with a giant trump piñata in tow, and Clift takes her time to let the joke sink in while taking in some stunning central Mexican landscapes.
La Buena Madre premiered earlier this year at the Kinsale Shark Awards in Ireland where it picked up a slew of awards, and now is available online for our viewing pleasure.