4 Moons

The film tells four separate stories set in Mexico. One is an eleven year old boy who does not understand what he feels for his cousin and hides it. One is two university students, friends since childhood, one of whom moves closer to the other. One is a couple long together, one of whom is drawn to someone else. The last is an old poet looking for a man he knew in his youth and paying to find him. The four stories do not cross. Sergio Tovar Velarde writes and directs. The structure rests on age: childhood, youth, middle age and old age. How the same matter looks in four different periods is compared throughout. What interests the film is being seen. In all four, the characters have to decide whether to say what they feel, and the cost of that decision differs in each period. Social pressure about homosexuality in Mexico stands behind the narrative and the film gives it without preaching. The strand with the old poet is its strongest; the narrative does not slide into sentiment there. Its limit is balance; the four are not of equal strength and deepening all of them in a short running time is not possible. Who it is for: viewers who like Latin American independent cinema and episodic narrative. Who it is not for: the stories are unequal, some strands stay thin, and their disconnection makes it feel scattered.