Surviving Hurricane Otis: Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau crafts ambitious film about two sailors who lived to tell the tale

Three years ago, a category-five hurricane devastated the Mexican resort of Acapulco. Amid images of a shattered city, the impossible emerged: the story of sailors who survived Otis on their boats. Marlon Valdez and Jonathan Chico’s feat was to withstand the winds that destroyed buildings, uprooted trees and dislodged entire hillsides, killing at least 52 people and leaving 31 missing, most of them sailors like them.

Jorge Michel Grau, 53, read their story in EL PAíS and it “blew my mind.” From that starting point he built a work of fiction, Surviving Hurricane Otis, focusing on “two ordinary people who face the extraordinary.” The film, which is produced by Netflix and Perro Azul, will open in theaters next month.

“It was a project that was unheard-of for national cinema, for the budgets of national cinema and, above all, for the worldview of what we do,” the director says. “It felt prohibitive to think about films that big, but then you realize there are trained professionals here, and we have the capability to make films of that size.”

Over the course of three years, 800 people worked on Surviving Hurricane Otis, 500 of them dedicated solely to visual effects. “There was a whole army of people creating sea water, waves and wind, layer upon layer,” Michel Grau recounts, saying the film faced the major technical challenge of simulating a maximum-category hurricane, with winds of 170 miles per hour, on a soundstage.

“A film about a natural disaster of this scale had never been made in Mexico. There are some films about earthquakes — I have one myself, 7:19 — but at a budget level you would view as independent cinema. This is a film that Mexican cinema has never seen before,” the director says of the biggest project he has ever undertaken.

He lists the details: at Churubusco studios in Mexico City they built a 200 m² water tank and three eight-ton boats for the water shots, used fans and water cannons, and had a graphics schedule showing how the wind moved and sea level rose at every moment of the hurricane.

“The film has something very powerful: we took it very seriously. We knew at what time the wind blew and in which direction, and that’s how we filmed it. So in the film you see, minute by minute, how the hurricane approached, how it trapped them, how it ripped them from the pier and later returned them,” he describes. By “them” he means the two main characters, Whirpul and Cándido (the half-brothers who star in the film), and, of course, Marlon and Jonathan (the real-life survivors who are not brothers but are best friends).

The two Acapulco sailors were part of the production: they advised, worked with the actors, were on set, helped in postproduction, and checked the radio codes between boats in the script; they also appear in one scene on screen and are the ones who communicate by radio with the protagonists when the hurricane hits. “It was playing with metafiction. We were telling a story in which they were actually there, so what we are seeing was what happened to them, what was happening to them in that moment,” Michel Grau explains.

“It was a really great process,” Jonathan Chico says by phone. “From talking with the writers and the director, telling the story again and again, helping the actors with idioms and showing them how to handle a boat, to doing our super cameo. All that stuff was really, really great.” The two sailors, now 27, say they are excited and also nervous to see the adaptation. Neither one returned to sea after the hurricane. Marlon lives in Playa del Carmen, where he works at a hotel, and Jonathan is a software developer in Mexico City.

In addition to interviews with the two sailors, the film team interviewed other Otis survivors, members of Civil Protection, the Navy and the National Meteorological System. It was an “exhaustive” investigation to ensure that in a hurricane film, the hurricane itself would be the “least important” element. “We wanted to do a project with a national identity. So, faced with such a dramatic event that could be seen from any perspective, we decided to show it as a Mexican would,” the director says. He describes the contrast between the two protagonists, the humor in extreme situations and the recognizable sibling relationship: “We wanted people to see themselves on screen, so that even if you might be distracted by the special effects and the hurricane, you wouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is a Mexican just like you up on that boat.”

One angle of the film is also very Mexican: social inequality. When Otis hit Acapulco on the night of October 25, 2023, dozens of captains, sailors, mechanics and hostesses were aboard boats. They had all been sent by the yacht and sailboat owners to look after them. This practice, common in the country when storms threaten, is known as “velar.” That day, even though Otis’s arrival was known, captains from inside and, especially, outside Acapulco sent workers to face a hurricane to protect vessels that were mostly insured. Twenty-four sailors remain missing to this day.

That tragedy is also represented in the film. “It also served us to have an antagonist, a villain who wasn’t the hurricane, because in reality the hurricane isn’t a villain — it’s an event that exposes these social divisions and disparities and makes them personal,” Michel Grau reasons, exploring in the fiction the privilege that allows one to ask: why did they go back on that boat?

After a run in movie theaters, the film will be distributed on Netflix, and the director warns: “Whoever watches it will find a hurricane film, but above all they will find Mexico.”

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