The year 2021 marks the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. To commemorate the historical occasion, director Rodrigo Reyes offers a bold, hybrid cinema experience, mixing non-fictional and performative elements with components of a road movie.

Through the eyes of a ghostly conquistador, Reyes recreates Hernán Cortez’s epic journey from the coasts of Veracruz to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the site of contemporary Mexico City.

As the anachronistic fictional character interacts with real victims and subjects of Mexico’s failed drug wars, the filmmaker portrays the country’s current humanitarian crisis as part of a brutal and unfinished colonial project, still in motion, 499 years later.