Director Pedro Kos made his bones as an Oscar-nominated documentarian, so it makes sense that his first narrative feature, In Our Blood, is about two people making a documentary. But the film, which premiered at Fantasia on Wednesday, builds to a twist that, if included in a real documentary, would upend the entire world.
The film follows Emily Wyland (The White Lotus‘ Brittany O’Grady) and cinematographer Danny (The Old Man‘s E. J. Bonilla) as they bootstrap their way through a very personal doc about reuniting with Emily’s mother Sam (Euphoria‘s Alanna Ubach), who was addicted to drugs during much of Emily’s life.
They learn about Sam’s life in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where addiction and a drug cartel called Los Carcineros (“the butchers”) have a strong hold on the locals. Homelessness and apparent mental illness bedevil Sam’s circle, and Emily and Danny’s efforts to learn more about her mom are met with bloody opposition. Some people are easily forgotten, and others want them to stay forgotten.
But Emily and Danny, though complex motivations that include making a film that will boost their careers, want to document the lives of the lost. In Our Blood unfolds through Emily and Danny’s footage, and they luckily have a habit of lying about when their camera is on.
The film, based on a story by the film’s producer, Aaron Kogan, and written by Chucky and Fear the Walking Dead veteran Mallory Westfall, drops clues but assiduously avoids giving away too much, until the packed final minutes.
Kos’ Netflix documentary short “Lead Me Home” (co-directed with Jon Shenk) premiered at Telluride in 2021 and was nominated for an Academy Award. His most recent feature, the documentary Rebel Hearts, premiered at Sundance in 2021 and is currently streaming on Max.
He was previously a writer and producer on Netflix’s Emmy-nominated documentary feature, The Great Hack, and editor on Jehane Noujaim’s Academy Award-nominated The Square, for which Kos won an Emmy Award.
In some ways, In Our Blood brings Kos, a Rio de Janeiro native, back to his days at Yale University, when his focus was on Theater Directing. We talked with him over email about using the tools of documentary to make a narrative film, taking advantage of the film’s transfixing Las Cruces setting, and holding back details.
MovieMaker: What was the origin of In Our Blood?
Pedro Kos: The first spark of the idea for In Our Blood came from my dear friend, collaborator, producer and manager, Aaron Kogan. He actually had this idea way back in college, when we were making our very first film together, but he never told me about it.
A few years later, he started developing it with our other amazing producer, Steven Klein, who actually plays Isaac in the film. Aaron, Steven and Clay Tweel continued to develop the story, and then they brought in this genius young screenwriter, Mallory Westfall, who wrote a draft of the film.
That’s how the project first came to me — Aaron brought me the draft and pitched it to me as my first fiction film. I remember that my initial response to him was that I didn’t think I was the right person for it because this was far outside my wheelhouse.
I had been working on documentaries for many years and even though I was a big fan of genre films, they were very formative in my upbringing, I didn’t feel confident in my ability to tell this kind of story. But then Aaron said “That’s exactly why you’re the right person to make this film.”
So I sat down with Mallory’s screenplay and I had this moment where I suddenly saw the extraordinary potential of this film to explore all of the themes and ideas that I had already been exploring in documentaries, but in this supercharged way.
It was an opportunity to examine and question our world, and its tendency to push the most vulnerable to the margins, but through a very different lens.
MovieMaker: Given that your B.A. is in theater directing, does this feel like a departure from your speciality — docs — or does it feel like a return to what you always wanted to do?
Pedro Kos: Yes, I loved doing theater in college and this was definitely a return to something that I really loved and missed. Working with the actors was such a joy every day. I asked for rehearsals because I wanted to workshop the scenes and make the film feel as organic and lived-in as possible.
I felt passionate about giving our extraordinary cast, especially Brittany O’Grady and EJ Bonilla, the space for them to take the material and really make this their own, and also to really ground the performances to the reality of our world today.
It’s funny because, even though this was my first fiction film, it didn’t feel like a departure from my documentary work that much because I approached In Our Blood in a very similar way that I would a documentary film. I see this film as very much a story about our world, depicting the issues that we are struggling with as a society today.
MovieMaker: How did you get to know the Las Cruces-El Paso region where this takes place? How did you use the location to bring the film to life? How long did you film there, and can you talk about any advantages or challenges to shooting in the area?
Pedro Kos: It was imperative to me to approach In Our Blood not only as fiction but also as a documentary. So that meant doing a lot of research and really getting to know the place itself, because Las Cruces is a real character in the film.
I went there months earlier and really tried to absorb the city and get to know the people there. And that meant going to different organizations —rehabilitation clinics that were working with people experiencing homelessness, food banks, et cetera.
Las Cruces is located right on the US-Mexico border, and as an immigrant myself I wanted to ground this story on the frontlines of all the issues that we’re dealing with as a society, from the housing crisis, to the opioid crisis, to the waves of migrants coming to the U.S. seeking a better life.
It was really important for me to humanize these issues with real people and have us, the audience, look at our world from an outsiders’ perspective and not just depict a world of faceless dehumanized victims which we’ve grown so accustomed to nowadays.
So the interviews that you see in the film are real interviews with real people from Las Cruces. It was so important to us to include those. The clinic that you see in the film is an actual organization called Community of Hope. And everything we hear Ana explain to Emily about what they do there actually comes from the real interviews we did with the people who work in rehabilitation services in Las Cruces.
The encampment that you see in the film is a real encampment called Camp Hope, and the people that you meet were, at the time, the real residents there. It was important to us to represent real life and real people, because this is not about some heightened world; this is about Las Cruces and America today.
In Our Blood Director Pedro Kos on Creating a Sense That ‘Something Is Wrong Here’
MovieMaker: This is a genre film, but that doesn’t become apparent until the last 20 minutes or so. Did you get any pushback from anyone who said you had to be more clear about the genre, for the sake of promoting the film? Or for artistic reasons? How did you balance the need to foreshadow what’s coming with the need to preserve the surprise?
Pedro Kos: From the very beginning of the creative process through the writing, the prep and the production of the movie, a lot of effort went into putting together the pieces for this subtle, slow burn of a movie. We were very careful to conceal and withhold where it was ultimately going, without it being too much of a curveball.
We got to a certain point in post-production where we thought we would be better served by pulling back some things and really honing in on moments where we could give little nods and indications that the movie was heading towards a direction of genre.
And so if you actually pay attention and you go back to rewatch the film, and I hope people will, there are a lot of Easter eggs that are layered throughout the film from the very beginning, but you have to pay close attention.
And beyond that, I think the other thing we focused on was playing with tone and making the audience feel that something is wrong here. Something is wrong in this place and in this society. And that feeling of dread that grows throughout signals genre, but doesn’t give away the twists and turns of the story.
MovieMaker: Can you talk about how you blended documentary approaches and traditional narrative? Are you comfortable calling this a found footage film? Who, in the logic of the film, assembles the found footage? Or is that too much of a spoiler?
Pedro Kos: What I can comfortably say is that In Our Blood definitely falls into the category of a found footage film, but we are also trying to push the boundaries of what has been done in that subgenre by experimenting with the concept of perspective and who’s telling the story.
And regarding the blending of the documentary approach with the traditional narrative, beyond whatever I already mentioned in terms of using actual real interviews of people in Las Cruces, the way we approached the cinematic language was very much in the vein of raw documentary footage, which I am very familiar with having been a documentary filmmaker and editor for so many years.
So a lot of the techniques that you see in the film — i.e. zooming into interview subjects during questions, the dialogue that happens with the camera person off screen, the little chit chat that happens when you’re shooting B-roll — all these little details are things that happen on documentary shoots, and usually that footage is not heard or seen.
But we get little glimpses of that in the film, these lived in moments that feel very real and very grounded.
In Our Blood screens again Saturday at Fantasia. You can read more of our Fantasia coverage here.
Main image: Brittany O’Grady in In Our Blood.