Migration stories in film are as diverse as the migration process itself. There are heartbreaking stories with sad endings, there are those with romantic elements and there are stories of overcoming. “Millions of kilometers away“, the new film by Prime Video It has a little bit of all of that. Inspired by real life Jose HernandezThe plot begins with his journey from Mexico to the United States to work with his family as a farmer in the city of California. While still a child, José has to spend long hours in the fields and then try not to fall asleep in class, where his problems with the English language seem to be overcome by a talent that a teacher soon notices: mathematics. So José begins to dream of reaching the stars, and the corn he collects from the fields takes the shape of rockets.
Alejandra Márquez, a Mexican filmmaker internationally known for her work on the film Las Niñas Bien (2018), uses many characters from José’s childhood imagination to build her film’s visual universe. “I think cinema is about absorbing sensations and then finding the perfect symbols to communicate what you felt. It is an artifact that allows one to form meaning from symbols, and José’s story can be summed up in the symbol of a child playing with a corn rocket,” explains the director during a Zoom conversation with Skip Intro from “El Comercio”.
As a child, summer holidays are synonymous with joy and fun. For José, the arrival of summer meant the beginning of the time he hated most of the year: because he was faced with the harsh reality of having to work seven days a week collecting fruits and vegetables in the fields. Normally he had to balance this with his studies, but when it came to school, his parents did their best to relieve him of other burdens.
José remembers that his father had a sentence that he repeated to him and his older brothers: “If you don’t study, you live your future, there will be nothing for you but the land.” But it wasn’t always that way for the family simply to support them in dedicating themselves to their studies. The constant moves so his parents could work in different crops meant that José didn’t get good grades. Furthermore, it was only at the age of 12 that he began to speak English more fluently. This happened because a teacher, seeing the boy’s potential, decided to meet with his parents to remind them that a tree does not bear good fruit unless it takes root in one place.
Two years earlier, in 1972, little José had been shocked to see on television reports of Apollo 17, the last mission in which humans reached the moon. And that made me dream of going into space one day.
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Interview on the topic “A Million Kilometers”. (Source: Skip Intro)
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Portrait of a fighter
In the film, the actor Michael Peña is responsible for playing José Hernández in his adult version: when he managed to overcome the rigors of school to graduate from the university with a degree in engineering, he lost his desire to pursue the Applying for a position is no longer out of NASA’s mind program. For Hernández, the choice of protagonist couldn’t have been more right: “It wasn’t difficult for Michael to understand my story because he is also of Mexican descent. He is from the Chicago area and his family is also immigrants. “I think he identified very much with everything that happened to me,” the real José told us over a Zoom connection, as he recalled the interviews he conducted with the artist to express his doubts about the to clear up the construction of the figure.
“We had virtual meetings because the process fell during the pandemic and in these meetings he asked me questions, he asked me for details so that he could portray them in the film. But I think he understood everything and just wanted to express feelings about what happened. “I was lucky enough to visit the set and see with my own eyes how it all unfolded, and I pay tribute to Alejandra for her work as a director: it’s difficult to summarize a whole life in two hours, and she did it “Well done,” emphasizes the astronaut, who also recorded a cameo appearance for one of the final scenes of the film.
José Hernández and his mother on the day of his engineering graduation from the University of the Pacific. He later earned a master’s degree from UC Santa Barbara.
“A Million Kilometers” reaches its best rhythm when it tells us how José Hernández goes from being an engineer to being an astronaut. We see him get rejected eleven times and begin an exercise in endurance with scenes reminiscent of “Rocky” or “The Pursuit of Happyness.” But even within NASA, the fight to be taken seriously is just as complex, especially when there aren’t many people with whom you can identify.
“There are very few people of color as astronauts at NASA,” emphasizes Hernández, recalling that in his first months in the space program he met Kalpana Chawla, an Indian astronaut who met a tragic end but who served as an inspiration to him most critical moments of your process.
Kalpana Chawla died in the STS-107 Columbia Mission accident in 2003.
“She confessed to me that she felt strange in that environment and that she was glad I was there because there should be more of us. He told me about his efforts because it is difficult to be there and he always reminded me that they chose me because I was capable and that I had to change my chip to realize my abilities,” the astronaut told us about his colleague, who appears personally in the film. by actress Sarayu Blue.
Kalpana Chawla died in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated due to a technical failure just 16 minutes before landing on solid ground. This event had a strong influence on José Hernández and his colleagues. “I was very happy when she was chosen to go into space. You can imagine what it was like when the accident happened. It was very, very sad and affected us all very much. But as a tribute to her, I continued. I don’t think she would have wanted me to give up just yet. Rather, I continued in her honor,” Hernández told us in the Zoom connection.
Homage to the origins
In the film, in addition to José’s parents and a school teacher, José Hernández’s wife, played by Rosa Salazar, also plays a major role in the plot. The average age for participation in the NASA space program is 34 years old. José has already been rejected six times when he was well past that age. It was his wife who saw he was on the verge of giving up and told him, “Let NASA disqualify you, don’t do it yourself before you try.”
The real José Hernández on a NASA mission. Scene of Rosa Salazar and Michael Peña in “A Million Miles Away”.
So, at the age of 41, José said “yes” on his twelfth attempt. The film develops very well all the steps that the Mexican had to follow to achieve his goal and conveys several messages that the protagonist hopes will resonate with the viewer.
“I think a very beautiful message of the film is that it’s worth dreaming big. I want our people, our migrants, to see that they can move forward, regardless of what they leave behind in their country. And I also want my story to be a message to parents so that they can create a good environment for their children,” says the astronaut, who realizes that without this family spirit he would not have been able to realize his dream.
For filmmaker Alejandra Márquez, there is another transcendent message: that no one should be ashamed of their origins. “On the contrary, we should appreciate them,” emphasizes the filmmaker, who pays particular attention to detail to a score full of themes that pay tribute to Mexican culture and the mix that came with migration to the United States.
“There is no job that is humiliating or that prevents the generation of knowledge and ethics. This is what happened to José, who began his life as a farmer. For me it is very important to emphasize that we must honor our origins and not look outside, because what we need is within ourselves. The world makes us believe that we are always missing something, but in reality you have everything in you. You just have to look for it and pursue it to be able to do what you want,” he says.
Aside from that…
When streaming
“A Million Kilometers” will be available to stream from September 15th.
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