A filmmaker whose film Susana we highlighted at the start of the year as one of our Sundance Best of Fest picks, Gerardo Coello Escalante transforms an everyday moment, a child arriving at school with new shoes, into a devastating meditation on social class, cultural identity, and the painful dissolution of innocence in his short Business Trip (Viaje de Negocios). The film’s quiet but devastating impact lies in its understanding that coming-of-age stories are fundamentally about perspective and Escalante crafted his visual language accordingly. Positioning the camera at child-height to inhabit young Daniel’s worldview as his understanding of his father, and by extension, his place in the world, crumbles. Business Trip succeeds because it recognises that the end of childhood naivety is rarely dramatic, rather it’s quietly devastating, arriving through small revelations that reshape everything we thought we understood about the adults who built our world. As the film premieres with Directors Notes, we spoke to Escalante about the personal genesis and cultural heart of his narrative, his formalist visual approach bringing us entirely into the POV of his young protagonist and his mission to broaden the stories told in Mexican cinema beyond poverty and violence.
This is such a relatable narrative but told from a very specific viewpoint. Where did your story come from?
The idea for the film originated on my second date with my partner Amandine Thomas, co-writer, co-creative and editor of the film, as we discussed the similarities and differences of our upbringings, mine in Mexico City and hers in Virginia. How obsession with American products and commodities defined a lot of my childhood experience was something we both found interesting, and from various anecdotes and memories, the basic plot of the film started to take shape. We wrote the script and then several months later, in January 2023, decided that we would find a way to shoot the film that year. I approached my former elementary school and asked them for permission to shoot there. They agreed, but the film had to be shot before summer break because the school was going to start a big construction project that would change the look drastically.
The film was made on a shoestring budget. Amandine and I cast mostly out of the school, working with children and adults who had never acted before. The teachers in the film were my teachers back when I was in elementary school. To make it, so many friends and collaborators came together, and many children from the school came to perform as extras in our larger crowd scenes.
How did you translate those personal anecdotes with Amandine into a cohesive narrative that would resonate with audiences beyond your specific cultural experiences?
I wanted to make something that was a coming-of-age story, but that resonated in the way it was to grow up as a Mexican person during that time. We found this 2000s obsession with acquiring American products an interesting social and political phenomenon, and I thought that these light-up shoes, that maybe a younger child would want to wear in the US, to be a good metaphor for what I was trying to explore. Growing up, American trends would come to Mexico a couple of years later and the luckiest kids would go to Brownsville and San Antonio on big shopping trips over the weekend. The concept of the proximity to the United States serving as a form of social capital is familiar to any non-American person. But ultimately, the seminal moments in any kid’s life coming to understand the decisions adults are making and realizing that your parents are flawed human beings, is a wholly universal experience.
Opening with an unsettling, abstract sequence was the best way to invite the viewer into the beginning of the film.
I want to ask about your opening shot – the flashing lights and sterile soundscape are unsettling and don’t fit with the rest of the film – it left me with a real feeling of intrigue.
There were many different openings written. I wanted to communicate what the shoes meant, the longing for social capital, the appeal of this brand new American product. I had too many ideas to fit in an opening moment that I couldn’t figure out how to make work. I decided to cut the opening scene and replace it with just the bright shining lights of the shoes – to turn the lights into these ominous, shining presences before being revealed as coming from the heel of the sneaker. I realized that opening with an unsettling, abstract sequence was the best way to invite the viewer into the beginning of the film, which begins bright and light and changes tone halfway through the film.
The camerawork is, for obvious reasons, very focused on his shoes, but is also centred on the children at their height, which feels so intimate. What filmmaking techniques did you employ to authentically capture the world through a child’s eyes while maintaining the thematic complexity you were exploring?
The film had to be told from the perspective of Daniel, and the revelations needed to unfold for the viewer at the same time as they unfold for him. His revelations are private and thus we knew we had to be close to him, with him. A lot of the visual language came from wanting to live in his perspective. We also wanted the film to have a certain timelessness to it, we avoided most markers of time period like cars, screens and computers. We took a formalist approach, avoided handheld and moved the camera when the character motivated it to.
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I am blown away by the level of performance from such young actors, especially since a lot of them are non-professional.
Working with the cast of young actors was the most rewarding process of the entire filmmaking journey. Most of the kids were cast out of the school we were shooting in and it was their first time in front of the camera. It was wonderful to experience the film set through their awe. I didn’t employ any special techniques other than trying to foster an environment of trust and freedom to play. They were just incredibly talented and deeply understood the stakes in the script. We truly just got lucky.
A lot of the visual language came from wanting to live in his perspective.
Working with child actors within a tight schedule presents unique challenges. How did you plan the production in order to maximise your shooting time?
We knew we had just three short days to shoot the film; therefore, we needed to come in with a very tight plan to execute it. I worked on the shotlist in a lot of detail with Cody Powers, the director of photography, and Amandine. We dissected every scene to make sure we were getting everything we needed in the most efficient possible way. We color-coded our shotlist to denote the minimum shots we needed to tell the story vs. the shots we really wanted to get, but might not have time to. I also made a horrible stick figure storyboard, which at least allowed me, Amandine and Cody to visualize the edit. We were always thinking about the edit, and we used almost every shot that we got.
I felt his pain, confusion and anguish so acutely in that last shot where you track him running around the court, tell us about the thought process behind that and the filming of it.
I knew the end of the film needed to be a private moment with Daniel as he is punished and runs around the court in PE class. Maintaining a frontal close-up on a running kid became the challenge and we knew right away we needed a rickshaw to get the shot. When you work with a limited budget, you don’t always have access to the state of the art gear. In our case, we had a pull cart of sorts, with a seat where our Steadicam operator was strapped in and our Gaffer, whose nickname is Monstruo due to his height and strength, pulled the cart running around the court. Our sound recordist and 1st AD ran alongside the cart. The rest of the crew had to be in the center of the court, which became the only blind spot. We all knew that we would only have a few takes, given that we couldn’t exhaust our Gaffer and Rodrigo. We got the shot on the third take.
Your background in both Mexico and the United States informs your storytelling perspective. How does this cross-cultural experience shape your visual language and the stories you’re drawn to tell?
Growing up in Mexico I was obsessed with American films and media. Most of the films I watched and the stories I tried to relate to came from the United States. That is partly because there were not as many Mexican films made as American films, but more importantly, it’s because many Mexican films that made it to larger audiences were centered on the aspects of our culture that a foreign tastemaker had decided were worthwhile stories to tell.
I grew up before the fever of narco films and TV shows, but I did grow up with stories that centered around poverty, migration and violence, the extremes that exist in my country. While those stories are important and worth telling, I didn’t often see representations of Mexican life that were truer to most of my day-to-day life. Most of my early film education came from American films, and it wasn’t until years later, when I left Mexico to study and to live in New York, that I discovered and fell in love with Mexican cinema. I am interested in films that expand upon what has traditionally been deemed worthy to depict in Mexican cinema, and I want to make films that are most of all honest.
Mexican films that made it to larger audiences were centered on the aspects of our culture that a foreign tastemaker had decided were worthwhile stories to tell.
It must have been a wild ride to premiere at Sundance so soon after the film was made. How was the experience and what’s next for you?
Premiering at Sundance with this film in 2024 and then this year with our follow up Susana [highlighted as one of our Top Picks from Sundance 2025], has truly been a dream come true. Receiving the call from the programmers was surreal and it made me feel like I was finally a director and my voice was being recognized. We were so lucky after the premiere to play at international film festivals from Sarajevo to Tirana, Palm Springs, LALIFF and Morelia. We have met a ton of wonderful people, from filmmakers to film lovers to programmers, through traveling with our films. I am hoping to get a feature film off the ground next. Amandine and I are developing a couple of projects in the fiction and non-fiction spaces.
