Diego Quemada-Díez on The Golden Dream

It’s a couple of days after the Goyas, Spain’s national film awards, and Mexican director Diego Quemada-Díez is in a downbeat mood. His first feature film, The Golden Dream, nominated at this year’s ceremony, walked away empty handed. “It’s disappointing a little bit,” he says down the line from Barcelona. “We were nominated for best Latin American film, and we didn’t do any promotion. It’s like the Oscars: you need to campaign with the people from the academy and send them DVDs and call them and send them letters, and blah blah blah...”

Maybe it’s for the best. His mantelpiece must be groaning under the weight of the silverware that’s garlanded The Golden Dream so far: at the last count it had won 42 festival prizes, including the A Certain Talent honour at Cannes, which was shared between the director and his film’s young ensemble cast. Quemada-Díez and his brilliant debut are certainly deserving of the accolades.

The film follows a group of Guatemalan teens travelling north, chasing the American dream. It’s a fiction, based on reality and filmed with the veracity of documentary. Quemada-Díez calls The Golden Dream a “collective testimony,” with its narrative formed from interviews with over 600 migrants who have made their way to the States in search of a better life.

“I wanted to talk about this industrial, consumerist society that so destructive to the earth. It’s a model that is condemned to collapse” – Diego Quemada-Díez

“My idea was to talk about migration, and to talk about the issue of migration through the conflict of two kids,” Quemada-Díez explains. The two kids in question are Juan (Brandon López) and Chauk (Rodolfo Domínguez), and the clash between these two characters represents the territorial and ideological tensions at play in the Central American nations between the indigenous and Western cultures. “[Juan] believes in the Western values and believes in the American Dream – he’s very selfish and individualistic.” On Juan’s journey north with his girlfriend Sara (Karen Martínez), he meets Chauk, who’s indigenous. “[Chauk] believes in a different cosmogony and has a different set of values: he can share, has a morally grounded relationship to the earth, and has more feeling for things.” Like all good road movies, the journey the group takes isn’t just literal. “I provoke a transformation of the selfish individual, this Westernised kid – by the end he arrives and he’s another person.”

If this description suggests a warm and fuzzy slush-fest about personal growth you’d be mistaken. The Golden Dream’s heart-stopping power comes from its complete lack of sentimentality. This is demonstrated in the way in which Quemada-Díez refuses to reach for melodrama during the life-or-death situations that the characters encounter on the road. “What I have found myself in life is that when somebody passes away there is no arguing,” he says. “There’s nothing to say or do, it just happens, and when it does happen you just have to face it and move on.”

This attitude was also shared by the migrants Quemada-Díez interviewed. “They help each other during the journey, but they have some kind of unspoken agreement where if something happens they will continue,” he explains. “The objective is to arrive in the United States – it is more important than what happens to their companions.”

The 45-year-old has worked his way up in the film business, learning the ropes as part of the camera team of films by such luminaries as Alejandro González Iñárritu (on 21 Grams), Tony Scott (on Man on Fire) and Oliver Stone (on Any Given Sunday). When asked which filmmaker has most influenced him as a director, however, Quemada-Díez doesn’t hesitate for a second: Ken Loach. “I worked in three movies with him [Land and Freedom, Carla’s Song, Bread and Roses],” he says, “and the most important thing I learned, and a method I applied in the movie, was his of shooting in chronological order, the actors not knowing the story, and actors discovering what was going to happen next as we were filming.” Other techniques he borrows from Loach include using non-professional actors (“there is a power that non-actors have that an actor will never be able to match”) and working from a deeply human point-of-view.

This is not to say Quemada-Díez is slavishly aping his mentor. The Golden Dream diverges from our great social-realist director’s style in one respect: it tells as much of its story though its painterly visuals as it does though its authentic performances and dialogue. This is most acutely evident in Quemada-Díez’s poetic use of the landscape of Central America. “There are a lot of ruins in the film,” he says. “I like to talk about this society in ruins, not only in Mexico now that it’s in war, but also I wanted to talk about this industrial, consumerist society that is so destructive to the earth. It’s a model that is condemned to collapse.”