In ‘Radical,’ Eugenio Derbez plays a teacher who touches hearts in a tough Mexican town

Last January, the Mexican movie star Eugenio Derbez traveled to Park City, Utah, to attend the Sundance Film Festival with his wife, the actor and singer Alessandra Rosaldo, and his little daughter Aitana Isabella. His latest film “Radical,” directed by Christopher Zalla, in which Derbez stars as an inspirational elementary school teacher in a violent Mexican border state, brought the actor to Sundance for the third time. I’ve made movies that I think are going to be wonderfully good and suddenly you say ‘Mmm.’ It is so difficult to make a film because you don’t know where in the process you can go the other way and it is no longer what you expected.” “‘Radical’ was a film that was designed to be a small film, more of a festival film, and suddenly it gained impressive strength.” — Eugenio Derbez/ Actor y productor But with “Radical,” Derbez said, the opposite has happened. “‘Radical’ was a film that was designed to be a small film, a film more like a festival, and suddenly it took on an impressive force and seeing how people leave each screening, they leave touched, they leave thinking, crying, inspired, hopeful, many leave angry, but wanting to help, it is a cocktail of emotions that continues to surprise me,” Derbez added. “We have learned too many things and also the quality time that the three of us have spent has been very fun,” Trejo said, adding that the sense of believing in ourselves, “sometimes it is something very cliché, but it really helps us to use it to go very far.” Mía Fernanda Solís plays Lupita, a girl who dreams of studying philosophy and being a teacher, but destiny has another path for her in the film “Radical.” Working with these children was a very emotional and powerful bonding experience for Derbez, right up until the final scene in which the students take the Enlace exam.