Mexican filmmaker Elisa Miller (“Hurricane Season”) is teaming up with “Roma” producer Nicolás Celis and his Pimienta Films on a legal drama-cum-psychological thriller that the duo is pitching this week at the Venice Production Bridge’s Gap-Financing Market, which runs Aug. 30 – Sept. 1.
“Legítima” is based on the remarkable true story of Yakiri Rubio, a young woman who was kidnapped and raped by two brothers in Mexico City in 2013. After killing one of her attackers in self-defense, Rubio wound up finding herself behind bars and charged with murder in a case that shocked and scandalized the nation.
The film is based on “En legítima defensa,” a book written by Ana Katiria Suárez, the charismatic and unconventional lawyer who took up Rubio’s case, doing battle with Mexico’s corrupt and misogynistic legal system until justice was finally served and the young woman was freed.
Speaking to Variety from Mexico City, Miller admitted she hadn’t followed the Rubio case too closely until, two years ago, Celis gave her a copy of Suárez’s book about the groundbreaking trial.
“When Nico Celis gave me the book, I called him 24 hours later — because I read the book in 24 hours — and I said, ‘Dude, this is a fucking awesome story. We should make this film,’” said Miller. “And he said, ‘I knew it!’”
Miller met the producer in 2006 when they partnered to make her short film “Watching It Rain” (Ver Llover), which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes — something Celis modestly described as “a promising start in both of our careers.” He called Miller “an experienced and mature director” with the “capacity and motivation to bring to a project like this a fresh, daring and honest vision.”
“Since I read this story, I felt the impulse to take it to the big screen, because of the transcendent nature of the case, the strength that exists in its protagonists and the feeling of hope that I experienced when I learned that, despite a dark and turbulent path, justice was done,” Celis said.
Once she began researching the case, Miller recognized the historic precedent it set, marking the first time in Mexico that the legitimate-defense argument was successfully used in a case of gender-based violence — one that dominated headlines and captured the public’s imagination. “That to me is the most challenging part of trying to do a [movie] about it,” she said, asking herself: How do you bring a fresh look to a court case that played out so dramatically in the public eye?
That wasn’t the director’s only challenge. While “En legítima defensa” is a faithful account of the Rubio trial, Miller said she needed to bring an extra dimension to the script — which she’s co-writing with Samara Ibrahim — in order to present the protagonists of the lawyer’s bare-bones case study as fully developed, “flawed characters” with a “human side.”
“The logical way to approach this film was to make a very straightforward, realistic, almost documentary-style [film] on how Mexico’s corrupt system works,” she said. “But when I started to go further into the book and further into the case and started to meet the real characters…now the film goes beyond that.”
Miller described “Legítima” as a fact-based psychological thriller — or, as she preferred to characterize it, “‘Anatomy of a Fall’ in Mexico corrupto” — saying of her two heroines: “I have so much empathy for them. I lived through their nightmare [after reading the book]. What these girls went through was a complete and absolute nightmare — in the reality of my country.”
Over the course of developing the film, the director has come to know Rubio and Suárez well, viewing them not only as collaborators but as friends. Pointing to the duo’s dramatically different socioeconomic backgrounds — Rubio comes from a Mexico City barrio, Suárez from a more privileged class — she stressed that the main theme of “Legítima” is “sisterhood.” The 2013 trial, she said, sparked Mexico’s first widespread protests in support of women’s rights and “absolutely has changed how we relate between women.”
Meanwhile, Rubio and Suárez have launched a civil association and perform pro bono legal work on behalf of women from underprivileged backgrounds. Not long ago, Miller accompanied them to Mexico’s congress, where their advocacy work helped to enshrine the legitimate-defense argument as law, protecting a woman’s right to self-defense if her body shows evidence of violence.
Celis said the duo’s story is a triumph “in a country where most similar cases do not have the same ending, and where women like Ana Katiria, and Yaki herself, work hard every day so that at some point this will no longer be the norm.” “It’s such a beautiful story for me. I admire these girls, both of them, so much,” added Miller. “I really admire them, and I really want to get their essence into the film.”
