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Luke Lorentzen’s MIDNIGHT FAMILY Opens January 10th at The Tivoli Theater in St. Louis – We Are Movie Geeks

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Luke Lorentzen’s MIDNIGHT FAMILY Opens January 10th at The Tivoli Theater in St. Louis

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Luke Lorentzen’s acclaimed new documentary MIDNIGHT FAMILY opens this Friday January 10th at The Tivoli Theater in St. Louis (6350 Delmar)

In Mexico City, the government operates fewer than 45 emergency ambulances for a population of 9 million. This has spawned an underground industry of for-profit ambulances often run by people with little or no training or certification. An exception in this ethically fraught, cutthroat industry, the Ochoa family struggles to keep their financial needs from jeopardizing the people in their care. 

When a crackdown by corrupt police pushes the family into greater hardship, they face increasing moral dilemmas even as they continue providing essential emergency medical services.

Director Luke Lorentzen’s notes on MIDNIGHT FAMILY :

“I moved to Mexico City in December of 2015 and lived around the corner from the General Hospital. Every day, I walked past hundreds of desperate people waiting outside the gate of the overburdened facility, and I slowly grew curious about the state of medical services in a city of 9 million. Though I hadn’t come to Mexico to focus on healthcare—I was there to develop an entirely different film—it was impossible to ignore the sheer force of the emotions I encountered on my daily commute. Without knowing exactly what to look for, I began to explore.I knew I had found a story worth telling after meeting the Ochoa family. One afternoon,sixteen-year-old Juan was cleaning their ambulance outside the General Hospital as his 9-year-old brother, Josué, clumsily juggled a soccer ball. Intrigued by the idea of a family-run ambulance, I asked them if I could ride along for a few hours. Fer, the father, was quick to agree. What I experienced that night was jaw-dropping—a film waiting to be made.Over the next six months, I lived in the back of the Ochoas’ ambulance, filming, with gut-wrenching access, Mexico City’s cutthroat underworld of for-profit healthcare. As I soon discovered, this industry was new not only to me but to locals as well. I spoke with politicians,taco stand owners, families and students; almost nobody knew where their ambulances came from or what sort of EMTs were behind the wheel.The Ochoas became my close friends. I loved being with them and knew they were good people. And yet the more time I spent in their ambulance, the more I learned about darker details of their operation. I discovered that they were not all certified as EMTs and that their ambulance was unregistered and not fully equipped. While they continued to provide much-needed services to a city lacking sufficient emergency care, I saw their financial insecurity begin to affect their treatment of their patients. My sense of right and wrong in knots, I kept asking myself, “What would I do here? What’s the better alternative?” I rarely had good answers, if any at all. And as their frequent run-ins with bribe-demanding police officers made clear, the Ochoas were operating within an inherently corrupt, dysfunctional system, trying to scrape by like millions of other Mexican families.As the accidents became more serious and the pressure on the Ochoas intensified, the lines I hoped they wouldn’t cross drew frighteningly close. Though often proud of their work, at other times I worried for the patients in their care. This emotional and ethical confusion became thecentral tension of my story.Working as a one-man crew, it took months of trial and error to figure out how best to tell this story. The Ochoas’ repetitive nightly routine let me experiment with different styles of shooting and gave me multiple opportunities to work with the feelings and energy that I was witnessing.I wanted the film to be first andforemost a thrilling experience. With my camera, I hoped to convey the physical and emotional roller coaster I was riding every night. I knew that interviews, music and voiceover could pull the audience out of the ambulance’s world and lead them to judge the Ochoas’ work from a disconnected perspective. I also knew the questions I wanted to explore were delicate. Viewers would have a spectrum of reactions, and showing the situation instead of telling it would encourage a much richer and more nuanced conversation.Inspired by patiently composed ethnographic works as well as drama-filled narrative films, I felt the Ochoa’s story provided a unique intersection of these two cinematic modes, which are often considered contradictory. My aim was to take an audience on a breathtaking ride while honoring my conviction that long takes and distilled observation could offer a bracing form of realism. “