Silver Nitrate

In 1990s Mexico City, in a film industry in transition, two long-time friends are caught up in searching for whatever magic the movies might still have left—and trying to make a living. Montserrat is a brilliant but underappreciated sound editor, excluded from the behind-the-scenes boys’ club, an expert in classic film technique, and a horror aficionado. Tristán is a disgraced actor, blamed for the death of a well-connected actress in a drug-fueled car crash, who finds himself desperately looking for work as the tenth anniversary of the accident approaches.

Enter cult director Abel Urueta, who lives in Tristán’s new building and strikes up a bargain with the two. The end of Urueta’s career, and all his bad luck since, he insists, was the result of his uncompleted last film, Beyond the Yellow Door.

Urueta spins them a tale of working with a Nazi occultist who believed he had a way to infuse magic into the unstable silver nitrate film stock used at the time. With both film and spell left incomplete, Urueta claims he and the others involved in the production were cursed. And the filmmaker believes if the three of them finish the project now, all their fortunes will change for the better. Montserrat and Tristán reluctantly agree, and descend into a world of dark knowledge and darker secrets…