Sergio Olhovich
Back in 2004, I proposed to the writer Carlos Montemayor that we make a film about the expropriation of the oil industry. Why was I so interested? Because my father was a petroleum engineer. He emigrated from Russia to Mexico, searched for oil in the state of Tabasco for many years, and discovered the first oil field there. He was working for the Shell Oil Company. In Mexico, before the expropriation, it was called El Águila. So I came to understand from a very young age the importance of oil to the world economy. And in Mexico, that oil was in the hands of foreign companies. American, English, and Dutch. Shell, Standard Oil, Huasteca, and other companies — seventeen foreign companies were taking the oil out of Mexico. And Mexico was left with nothing, until the government of Lázaro Cárdenas arrived.
It was a leftist, nationalistic government — the last of the Mexican Revolution. And Cárdenas came to understand that the oil industry had to be expropriated. Thanks to that, Mexico became master of its energy and acquired an important degree of sovereignty. It was the culmination of the Revolution. So Carlos and I began writing a script. But it turned out to be a very complicated task.
A lot of research and interviews had to be done, analyzing all of the footage from the time. And when we finished writing the argument, it was a three-hundred-page tome — but a movie of an hour and a half can’t be more than ninety or a hundred pages. And at that time, there wasn’t the boom in television series like there is now. So it had to be a film. Unfortunately, at that moment Carlos passed away. So I had to narrow it down without losing the essence.
By then it was around 2010–12, and we were in the midst of neoliberal governments that now wanted to privatize the oil industry! Of course, they weren’t interested in such a film. So when…
Auteur: Sergio Olhovich
