Incomparable to Adam and Eve's artistic, sophisticated, timeless vampire bodies are the real ephemeral human bodies of Heli, a film for which Amate Escalante deservedly won the Best Director prize. Here too, real monsters are humans, but the disillusionment with the human race in this film is not abstract. It is real and it hurts, no matter how incongruous with the screening context. What contributes to the visual effect of the real is the presence of non-professional actors, and the extraordinary photography by Lorenzo Hagerman. Without trying to convey a special message, the author shows extreme situations in Mexico, where fear, societal tensions, and violence can be a dominant reality. Similarly to two of his previous critically acclaimed films, Sangre (2005) and Los Bastardos (2008), Amate, in his own words, "tackles the way American culture impregnates Mexican society".

Heli is set in a city in central Mexico Guanajato region, where General Motors decided to build an automobile plant, causing the transformation of the ecosystem, the landscape, the demographics and the general atmosphere of the place. It has a particularly devastating effect on one Mexican family, which moves close to the automobile factory and tries to adapt to the new life. Their new 'home' consists of one tiny stuffy room accommodating all five, as we find out from the social worker: Heli (Armando Espitio), his wife (Linda Gonzalez), a baby, his father and a sister. Their new life is turned into a nightmare, when Heli's 12 year-old sister, Estela (Andrea Vergara) falls in love with a police cadet, with whom she dreams of escaping into a better and more romantic future, but is instead drawn into the brutal underworld of cocaine trafficking, institutional corruption and young gangs TV& video games-fed sadism.

By breaking up the linearity of the narrative, Escalante starts the film with the powerful single shot sequence of bleeding human bodies inside a moving truck, followed by two decapitated bodies hanging over a bridge. This opening sequence sets the tone for the film that unfolds its narrative as a long sinister flashback on the Mexican every-day life of violence, crime and corruption. With its long slow tracking shots, Heli contrasts the breathless beauty of the surrounding landscape with the monstrosity of humans in torture scenes.

Shot on digital, trying to get as close as possible to the human look (working with 50mm lens) more in a Bressonian than Bunuel's Olvidados style, Escalante strives to adhere to the reality - not to the reality he has lived personally – but to the one he has imagined based on daily newspapers and TV news in Mexico. The film's title "Heli" refers to a newspaper article, which told the story of a real-life 10-year old boy named Heli, who was caught in a shoot-out between his gang and the police. The name was chosen for its sonority and has no mythological reference, explains the director. In spite of the director's aim to demystify, strip down and bare the narrative of any superfluous unreal details and extra-filmic mystical connections, the names of Heli and Estela, however coincidental, could not be more fittingly chosen as symbols in a film on innocent victims and unpunished evil perpetrators. Unlike Hitchcock who sought the narrative power in the mysteriously hidden, Escalante lets the camera unflinchingly show the hidden and darker side of Mexican society, the real look of which is aided by natural humans and Hagerman's cinemas verité style photography. Minimalist and beautiful simultaneously, the photographic quality of naturalistic gruesome scenes of violence is more reminiscent of some of the finest works of Yugoslav so-called black film (Zivojin Pavlovic first comes to mind) than the spectacularly choreographed, stylized, Tarantino-glamourised violence of a Hollywood blockbuster. These atrocious, horrifying real-life images of killings, decapitations, hangings, and castrations may be more disturbing to the viewers than the images they are used to sadistically watching in the everyday media. With very little verbal narrative, the camera simply lets the visual language speak of the characters' harrowing experience and emotions, creating the overall ambiance of desolateness, human despair and helplessness in the face of monstrous, unspeakable, violence.

Achieving to show not only what we might have thought was unrepresentable, but also the unspeakable, Heli, in spite of its somewhat abrupt macho ending, serves to remind the human race that violence is always performed by humans, not by some extra-terrestrial, zombie-like or digitally created monsters.

The other Cannes

Other sections of Cannes, away from the star-stud screenings, were no less vibrant. Indian cinema was given a special focus, as it celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. One of the busiest film markets in the world, Marché du film, presented thousands of films from more than 100 countries. As European countries, unsurprisingly due to the financial crisis, have all experienced a drop in cinema attendance, the biggest rise was witnessed by Asian countries, especially China, now the world's second-biggest movie market behind the USA.

Many films, in general, displayed a penchant for repetition: repetition of themes, dialogues, or close-ups, perhaps to ensure we understood it properly. A film based on a true story of a gang of L.A. teens burgling the houses of celebrities such as Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton comes from highly talented Sofia Coppola, starring the Harry Potter icon Emma Watson. Bling Ring (screened in Un certain regard) tries to expose completely different realities of celebrities and of those thanks to whom they are celebrities – their fans. However, the film remains at a superficial and frivolous level of its celebrities' life, failing to analyse the deeper causes of the crimes or to tackle the subject of the obsession with the images of the famous and rich lifestyles. Even the brief cameo appearance of Paris Hilton couldn't contribute to the films' aspiring realism. On the contrary, repetitive dialogues and scenes of Paris Hilton's real-life house, which she generously lent for the filming (inviting more celebrity-obsessed robberies?), reproduce the mainstream celebrity/wanna-be-celebrity stereotypes rather than offer a social critique Coppola may have intended to offer.

The lack of depth prevails also in the sections of Quinzaines des realisateurs and Semaine de la Critique, especially in the first and second features.