The Inheritors

Here as in his first film TROPIC OF CANCER, Eugenio Polgovsky uses his camera as an exploratory tool to venture where other filmmakers might easily turn away. And few filmmakers have managed to so intensively document and reflect upon the poorest of the poor. The “herederos” of the title —children who have “inherited” a legacy of grinding poverty—live on the land. They plow, they harvest, they load wood and they build walls with the bricks that they made with their hands. They also frolic, and play and dance. Polgovsky and his extraordinary sound recordist Camille Tauss immersed themselves for three years in the lives of these children as they toil in the states of Guerrero, Nayarit, Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Puebla and Veracruz. LOS HEREDEROS is both extremely intimate (the camera’s point of view is like that of a tiny creature scurrying to keep pace with the kids) and pointedly universal, while rigorously refusing to draw conclusions. —AFI Film Festival