Diego Luna Uses 'Ashes' to Reframe Migrant Stories
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Diego Luna received an honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where he conducted a masterclass and attended an open-air screening of "Ashes," his fourth directorial feature.
- "Ashes" premiered at Cannes earlier this year and is adapted from a novel by Brenda Navarro, following a young Mexican woman (Anna Diaz) rebuilding her life in Spain eight years after her mother fled to Madrid.
- Luna said the film challenges conventional migrant narratives: "When we talk about migrants, we're not thinking about what they left behind."
- Luna credited becoming a father with his move to the director's chair, saying he started wanting "to tell my own stories" after years of working within other directors' visions like those of Alfonso Cuarón, Steven Spielberg, and Gus Van Sant.
- Luna's Disney+ "Star Wars" series "Andor" drew local fans in character merchandise at the festival, though he framed Sarajevo as a chance to engage audiences with "a different context than mine."
- Luna argued indifference — not hostility — drives global injustice, saying "If we were aware of everyone else\\'s journey, this would be a much nicer place to be in."
Why it matters: Luna is leveraging a major European festival platform to argue that what makes migration narratives reductive is not malice but indifference, a sharper diagnosis than most migration-focused films offer. By centering what immigrants carry rather than how they arrive, "Ashes" reframes a politically charged subject around empathy rather than policy. For Sarajevo specifically, a city still shaped by displacement, the resonance is explicitly personal.
Ask SkimNews
