A father of Mayan origins and his son Natan spend their last days together before Natan returns to live with his Italian mother in Rome. Spending their days at sea, their relationship grows as they connect with life above and below the surface of the sea.
Winner, Tiger Award, Rotterdam Film Festival 2010
Grand Jury Prize, Miami Film Festival 2010
Pedro González-Rubio Director
Filmography Selected
PEDRO GONZALEZ-RUBIO (1976, Belgium) has Mexican parents and lived for some years in India during his teens. He studied media in Mexico City before attending the London Film School.
He has been the cinematographer for several films, among which for
Born Without (2007)
by Eva Norvind.
Toro negro (2005) was his documentary debut.
Alamar (2009)
is his first feature film.
Watch a short interview
Read an interview in Time Out New York TORO NEGRO (2005, documentary)
ALAMAR (2009)
‘A staged documentary about a Mexican fisherman and his son that nonetheless manages to be tender, touching and true.’
Xan Brooks, The Guardian
'I loved every frame of it.'Geoff Andrew,
Time Out
★★★★
David Jenkins, Time Out
★★★★
'I doubt I'll see a more lovely film this year'.
Edward Lawrenson,
The Big Issue'TERRIFIC'
Total Film
'A gorgeous docudrama...a powerful portrait of prelapsarian bliss...sweetly moving'.
Kevin Maher, The Times
'A joy to behold'
Metro
'Alamar feels like a sun-kissed dream-drift. It’s a haze of a film, tremulous with emotion, bursting with poignancy.'
Sukhdev Sandhu, The Daily Telegraph
'A JOY'
Empire
'DO NOT MISS the Mexican film ALAMAR ...ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST’
Time Out
'A REVELATION'
Sight and Sound
'Delightful...a poignant cinematic ode to father-son relationships, an elegy to the virtues of freedom in childhood, and a passionate defence of the integrity of nature's few remaining paradises.'
Lee Marshal, Screen International
'Familial stories tend toward the melodramatic and the gratuitously messy; this pastoral-poetic Mexican film proves that simpler is almost always better. A Mayan father takes his ten-year-old son on one last fishing trip before divorce and relocation separate them; what emerges is a quiet, gorgeously photographed portrait of a long goodbye. Do not miss it.'
Time Out New York'In Alamar, a luminous semi-documentary on the border of reality and fiction, a young boy goes on an enchanted expedition with his father to the Banco Chinchorri, the largest coral reef in Mexico...'
Read the full review from
The New York Times
★★★★
'Relish the adventure...SUBLIME'
Time Out New York
'Jorge and Natan’s adventures have the verdant, lush texture of a Gauguin painting...This is a film so attuned to nature that one can easily drift off from the human narrative going on around its crystalline waters, cloudy skies, lounging crocodiles, and frigate birds.'
Read the full review by Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot.
