Cartel Films

[Carmine Osterland]

Soonafter the members of the chocolate cartel are introduced, we learn the strategy to which they owe their cushy, profitable position: while ostensibly fierce rivals to the outside world, each with their own shops, the chocolatiers actually pool their chocolate in a secret underground vault and strictly control the output so as to artificially depress supply, which ultimately raises prices in a market with pent-up demand.

Conspirators often take measures to conceal their communications and meetings, and while real-life cases do not usually involve such ostentatious means, they can still be elaborate. Some use code names and secret email addresses, while others might enlist a supplier to collect and distribute draft pricing announcements while she makes her sales rounds. Conspirators might even have a seemingly coincidental meeting at a charity golf tournament.

Something like this is what happened in North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC: as teeth whitening technology took off, dentists found it extraordinarily profitable. And when non-dentists started offering teeth whitening, the dentists used the state board (conveniently controlled by dentists) to reinterpret the dental scope of practice under state law and start going after non-dentists for the unlicensed practice of dentistry, even though teeth whitening is not actually dentistry.

Food tampering aside, this is classic group boycott behavior: a concerted effort by firms to persuade customers, suppliers, and other parties in the market not to do business with a rival firm whose competition imposes downward price pressure in the market.

A key lesson here is that Wonka faces the same potential liability for an antitrust violation as the chocolate cartel. A Sherman Act Section 1 violation requires two or more parties to agree to some anticompetitive restraint, and it does not matter if that agreement was voluntary. Wonka may be able to appeal to the conscious of the Department of Justice or a jury, but he will not have a legal defense to liability based on the fact that he was coerced or threatened into making the agreement.

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I began shooting in Arizona in June of 2013, taking two or three trips to Arizona over a four-month period. I had no intention of expanding the scope of the narrative outside the United States until my father randomly sent me a Wall Street Journal article about the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel that has wreaked havoc in the Mexican state of Michoacn for years. Suddenly, I knew I wanted to change the film to be about vigilantism on both sides of the border. More research led me to a Washington Post article about Dr. Jos Manuel Mireles, a small-town physician known as "El Doctor," who was the charismatic leader of the Autodefensas movement.

The more time I spent down there, the more complex the story became: it was partly an ascent of people seeking to fight evil and partly a descent into hell as they took the law into their own hands, with many twists and turns in between. It is about elemental issues of order and chaos, of the desire for law but also of terrifying brutality and lawlessness.

At first, I tried to sniff out what was really happening, who these guys truly were, where the movement was going, what the endgame was. And what I originally thought was a very simple story, especially on the Mexican side, was in fact much more complex and much more grey. I became even more motivated, almost obsessed, as the lines between good and evil became ever more blurred and the story progressed in dramatic and unexpected ways.

It is this moral ambiguity that intrigues me most, and it emerges naturally in the story and in our characters. The film doesn't offer simple answers and, instead, presents a narrative that I believe will be interpreted and understood in many different ways. In a sense, CARTEL LAND is a cautionary tale of what happens when men and women take up arms in a lawless society. For me, it is a timeless story of the conflict between idealism and violence, which has eerie echoes throughout history and across the world today.

What have been the differences in reception to the film in countries it has now travelled to?

I have been humbled and moved by responses from people around the world. In Mexico, this is a topic that dominates the headlines, but the film seemed to strike a deep emotional cord by providing a visceral window into the violence and corruption that people read or hear about every day or see glorified in movies or TV. In Colombia, given their history with cartels and paramilitary groups, the film resonated deeply. In the U.S. the film elicited many responses, but one that I never expected: at numerous screenings, drug addicts have come up to me, crying, saying that family members had tried for years to get them to stop, but that, for some reason, seeing the violence that their habits were perpetuating had a profound and poignant impact.

It was very important to capture this aspect of the story, and we tried for months to get into a lab. Every shoot I would try to find somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who cooked. Amongst our vast network of people down there, we thought we had a guy who could hook it up, and he kept telling us to be patient and promised to make it happen.

We drove through the mountains and made it to the town with minutes to spare. A pair of armed men asked if we were ready and told us to follow them. With the sun dropping rapidly, they drove us down a highway, off the highway, through towns and then small villages, which eventually gave way to vast, open farmlands.

As the barrels sizzled and smoke billowed into the air and the cacophonous sounds of cicadas rose and fell with an arrhythmic beat and huge alien-like bugs crawled down our necks and inside our clothes, I talked to the head chef and he told me:

One of the best things about being at film festivals is that most of the time you never know what is going to happen in the film you're about to watch. At Cannes, it's usually the first time the film is ever being shown to an audience. Walking into these films without any expectations or any idea what we're all in for can result in some of the most wildly exhilarating experiences when you encounter a truly ambitious, unexpected, one-of-a-kind creation. That's the case with Emilia Perez from French filmmaker Jacques Audiard. I shouldn't be surprised, however, considering my love for Audiard's films goes back all the way to my very first visit to Cannes in 2009 - Un Prophet (A Prophet) is still one of my all-time favorite Cannes films. 15 years later and Audiard has totally blown me away again with Emilia Perez, a full-on Broadway-esque musical about Mexican society and a Mexican cartel kingpin who changes sex and reinvents herself. I did not think we'd see a more ambitious film than Megalopolis at Cannes 2024, but here we are with Emilia Perez. Incredible.

This concept is part of what is so remarkably impressive about Emilia Perez. I couldn't believe this was the actual plot, not only that, but this is the plot in an audacious musical about a trans woman. There are songs about corrupt leaders, songs about cartel henchmen getting ready for a shootout, songs about transitioning ("woman to man or man to woman?"). It's a proper musical where in the middle of dramatic scenes actors will suddenly begin singing. If you don't like musicals you might find it a bit cheesy and over-the-top but I loved how FULLY musical it was. So many unbelievable songs. I never thought in my entire life I'd watch a musical about Mexican cartels and the problems with Mexican society. After returning to Mexico City, the plot shifts into an edgy attempt to reconcile the hurt that cartels have caused - thousands and thousands of disappeared / missing people killed off for no reason. Yes, there are some songs about this, including one right in the middle featuring hundreds of random Mexican people singing about the missing people and it made me quite emotional. I've seen plenty of films over the years about Mexico and the problems within this country, but Audiard's film really shook me up good. And not even made by a Mexican filmmaker! Go figure.

All-in-all, I can do nothing but rave about this film. Jacques Audiard is one of the greats. Each new film he makes is entirely different and bold and refreshing, crafted with a masterful understanding for cinema and storytelling. Emilia Perez will unquestionably have a huge impact - audiences at the Cannes screenings were applauding & cheering louder than any other film so far. It's certainly connecting with many viewers. Always invigorating to watch something you'd never imagined possible in cinema and somehow it comes together.

Pablo Escobar is possibly the most notorious and recognizable of cartel kingpins in recent years, his notoriety attributed in part to being the face of the infamous Medelln cartel in 1980s and '90s Colombia, but also from being the subject of the Netflix smash hit, Narcos where his reputation as the most fearsome man in South America preceded him. Charlie, chang, snow, blow, or as many know it, cocaine, the drug that has as many names as Salvador Dal, was the commodity Escobar dealt in. That white powder which is hoovered up through rolled-up dollar notes is associated with wealth, addiction, and a seductive quality that can be traced back to the days of 1920s Hollywood.

From TheWolf of Wall Street to Scarface, glamorizing drug use has become a habit within itself, and drugs have become the centerpiece of a surprisingly large amount of television lately. Aside from Narcos, the past 20 years have seen TV shows like Ozark, Breaking Bad, Weeds, and Queen of the South which focus on drug dealing and drug cartels, but Hollywood cinema might be the most prolific. Having become a Hollywood mainstay, these are some of the best movies about drug cartels.

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