Amat Escalante’s Heli is Mexico’s Oscar hopeful

Amat Escalante‘s ultraviolent crime-thriller romance involving a cop, a kid and a cartel won the director prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Now Mexico has submitted the controversial love story as its candidate for Oscar’s Best Foreign Language film.

“The film is a fiction. It’s about characters, a family that is destroyed by the violence and attempts to rebuild. Mexico’s drg wars is just the context,” Escalante told Variety Wednesday after “Heli” was named Mexico’s Academy Award submission.

Another clip after the cut.