Jorge Michel Grau, the Mexican director who traps his characters while the country breaks

Jorge Michel Grau

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	1973 Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The ABCs of Death, We Are What We Are, Lost Girl
Awards	Chicago International Film Festival, Silver Hugo Special Jury Prize · Fantastic Fest, Next Wave Best Feature and Best Screenplay · Morelia International Film Festival, Best Documentary

Jorge Michel Grau keeps returning to the same room. A family shut inside a cramped Mexico City home after the father collapses and dies in public. Two men pinned under the concrete of a fallen government building, talking because there is nothing else to do. The walls change from film to film; the city outside does not. It is Mexico, coming apart, while the people at the centre of the frame argue over who owes what to whom. A director who arrived through horror has become something harder to file: a chronicler of national catastrophe who now works for the largest streaming platforms in the world, and whose newest film tests whether that move has sharpened his instinct or sanded it down.

Grau, a native of Mexico City, studied communication at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and graduated with honours in film direction from the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, the state film school known as the CCC. He started on the practical side of the industry, producing cultural documentaries and educational television and working as a production manager on films backed by the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE), before specialising in directing at ESCAC in Barcelona. A short documentary made at the CCC, Kalimán, won the documentary award at the Morelia International Film Festival.

His first feature, Somos lo que hay, set the template. A family of cannibals living on the margins of Mexico City loses its father, and the eldest son inherits a role he is not sure he can perform. The film was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2010, where it competed for the Caméra d’Or, and won the Silver Hugo Special Jury Prize at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Next Wave prizes for best film and screenplay at Fantastic Fest in Austin. Released in English as We Are What We Are, it became the first Mexican film to receive an American remake, Jim Mickle’s 2013 version set in rural America. What made the original travel was that its horror was mostly social. The cannibalism mattered less than the hunger, and the hunger mattered less than a household closing ranks against a city that offered it nothing.

Grau then directed Chalán for the cultural channel Canal 22 and IMCINE, contributed the segment “I Is for Ingrown” to the anthology The ABCs of Death and shot “Muñecas” for México bárbaro, a portmanteau of horror shorts drawn from Mexican legends. His English-language debut, Big Sky, starred Bella Thorne as an agoraphobic teenager and Kyra Sedgwick as her mother, ambushed by gunmen on the way to a treatment centre in the desert; it was released in the United States in 2015.

7:19 is the film that best explains where Grau stands today. It unfolds in the minutes after the earthquake that struck Mexico City on the morning of 19 September 1985, almost entirely inside one collapsed government building, where Demián Bichir and Héctor Bonilla play a civil servant and a caretaker trapped beneath the rubble. Released in 2016, it is credited in Grau’s Morelia festival biography as the first Mexican film to have an international Netflix release. Excélsior argued that the earthquake was little more than a pretext for a two-man dialogue, and the complaint describes the choice exactly: Grau would rather press a national trauma into a space the size of a coffin than film the city from above.

Perdida is where the method misfired, and not on screen. The thriller, a remake of the Colombian film La cara oculta, stars José María de Tavira as the conductor of the Mexico City Philharmonic, who falls under suspicion when his partner vanishes. Before it opened in January 2020, its promotional campaign put up posters across Mexico City designed as missing-person notices, the format families use to search for the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared in the country. Search collectives called it insensitive. Grau apologised on Instagram, said he regretted the lack of sensitivity and announced that the posters would be withdrawn. The episode exposed the risk in a body of work that borrows its fear from Mexican reality: the nerve that gives Somos lo que hay its force can turn, in a release campaign, into a use of the grief it claims to understand. Perdida found its audience regardless, reaching Netflix’s top ten in Mexico in 2024.

Rabia, released in Mexican cinemas in 2023, moved the werewolf myth into a run-down housing estate, with Juan Manuel Bernal as a grieving, short-tempered father and Maximiliano Nájar Márquez as the son who begins to suspect what his father is. By then most of Grau’s work was going to series. He was one of the directors of High Heat (Donde hubo fuego) for Netflix, and he directed Every Minute Counts (Cada minuto cuenta) for Prime Video with Moisés Ortiz Urquidi and Fernando Urdapilleta, a drama led by Osvaldo Benavides about the first hours after the 1985 earthquake whose second and final season arrived for the disaster’s 40th anniversary in September 2025.

The autumn of 2026 brought two of his productions to the platforms within six weeks. Grau is one of three directors, with Roberto Sneider and Belén Macías, of The Trial (El juicio), Daniel Krauze’s Prime Video series in which Eugenio Derbez plays a father who takes on a powerful family after his teenage daughter is sexually assaulted by its son; it premiered on 11 September. On 23 October Netflix released Surviving Hurricane Otis (Contra el huracán), which Grau directed and co-wrote. Benny Emmanuel plays Wirpul, a young yacht hand about to be made captain, and Kristyan Ferrer plays Candi, the half-brother he barely speaks to; the two stay aboard their employer’s boat as Otis grows into a Category 5 hurricane and strikes Acapulco on 25 October 2023. The story draws on the experience of the yacht hands Marlon Valdez and Jonathan Chino. Grau has described the storm as something staged on the clock: the team knew at what time the wind blew and from which direction, and filmed it that way.

Between productions Grau teaches at the CCC, the school that trained him, and he has not announced his next project. What Surviving Hurricane Otis will settle is a narrower question than box office: whether the director who made a family’s hunger read as a portrait of a city can carry that unease into a streaming-scale disaster film, or whether the platforms’ appetite for true catastrophe will smooth his trapped rooms into spectacle. The third anniversary of the storm fell two days after the film’s release, and the answer now belongs to its audience.

Tags: Mexican cinema, Benny Emmanuel, Kristyan Ferrer, Surviving Hurricane Otis, Demián Bichir, Jorge Michel Grau