We Are What We Are

• The film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, where it received a nomination for the Camera d'Or (best first feature) award.
• It won Best Picture and Best Screenplay in the "Next Wave" Spotlight Competition at Fantastic Fest in Austin in September 2010.
• Director Jorge Michel Grau has said in interviews his goal was to use the family's cannibalism as a metaphor for a disintegrating family unit and the "tribal," predatory survival tactics he saw in modern Mexico City society — not a supernatural curse or ritual.
• The 2013 American remake was directed by Jim Mickle (not connected to M. Night Shyamalan); producers Rodrigo Bellott and Andrew Corkin acquired the rights, and that remake also premiered at Sundance and Cannes' Directors' Fortnight.
• Lead actor Francisco Barreiro plays Alfredo, the eldest sibling forced to become the family's provider — and its enforcer — after his father's sudden death.

The family's cannibalism is not a supernatural curse but a twisted metaphor for the predatory nature of society in Mexico City, where the vulnerable are forced to consume each other to survive while the powerful remain untouched.

The father's sudden death represents the collapse of traditional patriarchal authority, leaving the siblings ill-equipped to uphold the 'family business,' symbolizing the disintegration of social structures when the enforcing power vanishes.

The specific targeting of marginalized victims suggests the family views themselves as apex predators cleansing the city, a delusion that crumbles as they turn on each other, revealing their hunger is purely selfish rather than ritualistic.

When the patriarch of a Mexico City clan collapses and dies in a shopping mall, his three children — sons Alfredo and Julian, and daughter Sabina — scramble to maintain the family's grotesque dietary tradition: cannibalism. With no time to hunt fresh prey, the siblings turn their starving eyes toward the city's underbelly, spiraling into a frantic, blood-soaked scramble for survival. Grau strips away the supernatural, leaving only the raw, sweaty desperation of a family unit collapsing under the weight of its own insatiable hunger. It is a funeral procession for morality, served cold on a platter of urban decay.