‘Midnight Family': The Year's Best Documentary

I can’t recommend this movie highly enough. It will be an eye-opener for the lucky few who get a chance to see it in limited release. “Midnight Family” is one of those exceptional few, a documentary that ends up being more thrilling than any Hollywood blockbuster. It makes you forget you are even watching non-fiction filmmaking - the camera so fluid and the editing so precise.

I wrote this in my Sundance rave of “Midnight Family” on 02.06.19:

“Despite a population of close to 9 million, Mexico City’s government operates only 45 emergency ambulances. This shortage crisis has resulted in private paramedics becoming first responders to the critically injured. One of them is the Ochoas family, zigzagging through high-speed ambulance rides to care for the critically injured. Despite being unregistered, they are the underground lifeline for many. At first, you don’t know if what you’re watching is fiction or non-fiction. The masterful cinema vérité camerawork in Luke Lorentzen’s “Midnight Family” has a knack for sucking us into after-hours Mexico City and the fractured health care system at its disposal. From local competition to police bribes to patient’s unwillingness to pay their bills, the Ochoas have to navigate through all of that to make ends meet, then there’s the ethically questionable practice of making money off dying poor patients. This 81-minute masterpiece will change the way you look at documentaries forever; its style reads like an action movie, its themes like a socio-political drama, and, yet, it still is very much a work of non-fiction, with a camera always exactly positioned to capture a society on the brink of moral collapse.”

“Midnight Family” will arrive in select theaters on December 6.