Son of Monarchs
**Seen at the 2021 Atlanta Film Festival.
There’s something about homecomings that help teach us about ourselves. It doesn’t necessarily matter why we are returning home, but if it’s been a while, or because of a profound life event, the trip can spark a conversation within us that makes us see things with a different perspective. At its core, this is at the heart of Alexis Gambis’s “Son of Monarchs,” and it’s what resonates strongest with me.
Mendel (Tenoch Huerta) returns to his hometown for the first time in many years after the death of his grandmother. It is a small town within Michoacán, forests containing majestic monarch butterflies. Mendel went to New York to be a biologist, but his brother (Noé Hernández) stayed behind, with the burden of what that means for his life, and living with tragedies of their family. He goes to meet a friend who grieves in his own way, with a ritualistic fire and ceremony celebrating nature and man’s connection to the animal world. In New York, Mendel is studying the genes of monarch butterflies, and where their coloring comes from. The trip has left a mark on him, and even as he meets someone in New York, his return to his home in Mexico brings up painful memories, and further connects him to the subject of his research.
Gambis’s film creates an emotional narrative out of an exploration of scientific ideas regarding migration and wildlife conservation; being a scientist himself, Gambis has turned this into a personal study of the ways borders and changing environments separate us, and make our natural selves seem alien and unusual on the surface. The film is set in 2019, the Age of Trump, so we do get allusions to him and the Border Wall, especially in interactions with his friends about what Trump had said about Mexicans, and how the development of the Wall on the border has impacted the wildlife patterns there. Nature and man connectedness is one of the fundamental ideas of “Son of Monarchs,” and Mendel’s arc, and how he views that connection, gets more and more personal in how he looks at the butterflies in perspective of his life, and who he is. Huerta’s performance is very insular at times, making the moments when emotions hit even more impactful- like a scientist, Huerta digs into the work, and his success is deeply moving.
In 2016, I went up to Ohio for my cousin’s wedding celebration. I had been there a couple of years earlier, but this was the first time I had been up there by myself since 2000. Certainly, my primary focus was to see friends and family, but it was the time to myself, when I didn’t have to engage with others, that gave me time to reflect on where I’d come from, where I am now, and how those two connect. The ways in which they connect for Mendel leaves us with a feeling of him figuring out the ways his past and present connect, much like his work with monarch butterflies has found the ways in which genes connect and work together.
