Latin American highlights - Clermont-Ferrand FF 2025: Aferrado

Joel repairs engines, but now his own is overheating because of his side job as a gangster’s henchman. He must take a decision. A breathless ride through Mexico City begins.

Estaban Azuela’s "Aferrado" is an ingenious and breathless animated short that encapsulates so many complex stories about and layers to Mexico City.

Where did the idea come from?

I made this film trying to understand the origins of violence in my Mexican reality and the growing glorification of criminal figures through pop culture. Narrating it from a character who constructs his strength through acceptance in a criminal group, justifying himself through his passion for cars and socioeconomic status but ultimately defeated by the ambivalence with his culture that bind him to family values. In the end, it’s the portrait of a failed heroic figure of masculinity.

It was also important for me to show these characters from the innocent perspective of a 10-year-old child, like the one I was at that time, and to realise how it almost imperceptibly permeated me with video games and figures of power and competitiveness. Bringing these elements to a more intimate level; the attachment to our memories and how to live more freely if we detach from them, seen through the duality in European and Nahuas beliefs about life after death and what we take with us when we die.

Can you tell us about the shooting process and location?

"Aferrado" is an ode to my hometown, Mexico City in the 90s. All the locations were based on the characters neighborhood, the one I used to visit when I was young. All the locations were captured with photogrammetry, scanning in 3d buildings, pieces of pavement, assets on the street that helped me to reconstruct memories as we often do, incomplete, broken, selective.

What hurdles did you face?

I wanted to create a statement highlighting the contrast between big productions in pop cinema—like scenes featuring a character being chased on a motorcycle through the main streets of Mexico City, which would require dozens of people per shoot—and other techniques of image construction. So, I began researching the tools available at the time and stumbled upon 3D scanning, which could be done with a tablet and a proximity sensor on a non-professional stage with a small crew. What I didn’t know, though, was the huge gap we as Latin American users face when using this technology at the consumer level. Not just the technological lag back in the 2016 but the amount of computational process required—even for a low-poly aesthetic—demands expensive hardware, otherwise, the production time increases significantly. This is one of the reasons why this 18-minute film has kept us hooked for 9 years. Although, the learning curve with this difficulties was an amazing creative process where we needed to constrain the multiples possibilities of 3d software to minimal polygon modifiers.

What is your background as a filmmaker?

I entered film through animation, inspired by the animated allegories of Svankmajer, so my early works were more in the form of visual essays. With Aferrado, I wanted to connect with the audience through a popular narrative that could also make parallels to our consumption of violence in American cinema. I have a background in traditional and analog animation techniques, which helped me transition from stop-motion to a 3dscan-by-3dscan animation style with a low-fi aesthetic.

What stories would you like to tell next?

I enjoyed working fluid in a 3d background, but now I want to stay away from the mental process required by a linear narrative. So my next film will be a visual essay on the relationship between migration from Veracruz to the United States, and the extraction of natural dyes used in the production of U.S. dollar bills, sourced from the Veracruz jungle.

What do you like about the short format?

It’s definitely about experimenting. It’s more about trusting the process than being fixated on the traditional length of a film just to get it screened in theaters.

What are your hopes for the festival?

Aside from being inspired, meeting with my distribution company, MIYU, and finding production partners for my next film, I’m excited that my film—which could be categorised as animation—has the potential to be showcased at festivals that aren’t limited by genre. I hope it sparks meaningful conversations about new ways of constructing imagery in cinema, going beyond traditional genre labels.

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