Santiago Maza’s ‘Black Shine’ Illuminates the Long Wait for Justice After Mexico’s Pasta de Conchos Disaster

Mexican director Santiago Maza, whose feature documentary “State of Silence” — a passion project of Diego Luna — won the top prize at the 2024 Santiago Film Festival (Sanfic), has premiered his latest work, “Black Shine” (“El brillo negro”), at the Morelia Film Festival, where it competes for the top short-film award.

Set in the coal-mining region of Coahuila, “Black Shine” revisits the 2006 Pasta de Conchos mine explosion that buried 65 miners. Nearly two decades later, after years of neglect and impunity, families continue their fight to recover their loved ones.

Like “State of Silence,” which examined the killing of journalists in Mexico through the lives of four reporters, “Black Shine” centers on two individuals: El Güero, a former miner who has recovered his brother’s remains, and Elvira, who is still waiting for her husband. The documentary portrays grief as an enduring act of resistance and a refusal to let those lost beneath the earth be forgotten.

Speaking to Variety at Morelia, Maza explained that he met the subjects in 2021 while traveling to Coahuila to shoot a short film about climate change. There, he encountered the Pasta de Conchos organization, which has spearheaded the fight to exhume the long-buried bodies, some of which have since been recovered. “After 20 years of fighting for the recovery of the miners’ bodies, the families began experiencing deeply cathartic moments of rescue, like funerals filled with light and a long-awaited sense of peace.”

“The organization invited me to document this process, and it felt right,” Maza said. “I wanted to make a film that acknowledged the political weight of the struggle while focusing on its emotional dimension. Through the organization, I met Elvira and El Güero. Their stories felt like two sides of the same journey toward closure, capturing the possibility of peace after two decades of struggle.”

He added: “When the disaster happened in 2006, the mining company and the government effectively colluded to cover it up. They never properly searched for the miners. That was the second tragedy: the corruption and impunity that kept their families from recovering their loved ones. Three presidential administrations came and went before Andrés Manuel López Obrador visited the site in 2018 and promised that, if elected president, he would make the recovery happen.”

Juxtaposed against images of a blighted landscape, Coahuila-born writer Julián Herbert reads lines from a poem he wrote for the short: “It is the patience that endures, the water for the thirst of those who wait. Where there is love, there is no complete loss: there is the next sentence, the memory that stains and fades, the dawns that return. In the face of abandonment, presence: a fragile flash of lightning, light emanating from the act of waiting.”

“I think it adds another layer to the short film, allowing us to explore the symbolism behind the whole situation,” Maza noted.

Filmed in April with a four-person crew and minimal pre-production, “Black Shine” emerged from an instinctive, flexible approach. “This time, I pushed myself to trust my instincts and the visuals.” Over four intense shooting days, the team moved freely across the region, capturing landscapes and details that reveal its history and its people. As longtime collaborators, their shared understanding allowed them to work intuitively and immerse themselves more deeply in the story, embracing the agility of a small crew to get closer to the people and places they filmed.

Maza is next plunging into a new format for him: the mockumentary. Based on a documentary filmmaker not unlike himself, “Ecocides, Repent!” (“Ecocidas ¡Arrepentíos!”) contains autobiographical elements, he admits.

The protagonist discovers a support group — somewhat like Alcoholics Anonymous but for people who have harmed the environment. Some have polluted rivers, destroyed forests, or contaminated cenotes (sinkholes), and all struggle with guilt. Using dark humor, the film explores the lack of consequences for environmental damage in Mexico and around the world.

“He starts becoming the vehicle for them to work through their guilt, but in the end, he realizes that he also has his own regrets to work through.”

The script has been completed, and the next step is seeking state support in Mexico.

“Ideally, I’d like to develop it as a co-production with Spain, since part of the story takes place there,” Maza said. “We might shoot a small portion in Spain, but most of the film would be shot in Mexico. The country has such a diversity of ecosystems, from deserts to jungles, and the environments affected by pollution in the story can all be found here. That’s what allows the character to travel and explore these different landscapes.”

The 24th Morelia Film Festival wraps on Oct. 25.

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