The Historic Mercedes Hotel sits on the corner of South Missouri Avenue and West 3rd Street. The windows of the old hotel are boarded up, and the neon sign advertising air conditioning over the front door remains unlit.
But on Friday morning, the hotel was buzzing with activity as roughly a dozen people meandered around the property as they prepared to film a scene for the short film “El Jardin” inside the old walls.
A walk around the side of the hotel and through a red door lead to a set of wobbly stairs going down to the basement.
There, voices of the crew echoed off the old, white-painted cinderblock walls over the hum of portable AC units blowing in cool air to combat the triple-digit heat.
The crew adjusted some lights focused on a corner of the room as they prepared for the second day of shooting the short film.
Thomas Negrete, a producer, described the film as a “narco horror story.”
The story is about a man named Gustavo de Leon, played by San Juan native David Barrera, a narco boss who escapes from jail and is hiding in an abandoned building when he is visited by ghosts.
“We come to find out later in the story that all the ghosts of his past, all the people that he’s inflicted violence on, come out to haunt him,” Negrete explained. “So it’s really a story about justice. It’s very much an antihero story, and we feel very relieved, or we feel a lot of satisfaction out of seeing him suffer for the first time.”
Robert Longoria, the film’s director, described the film as a cross between “The Devil’s Backbone,” “Sicario,” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”
“So it’s basically if El Chapo escaped, but he found himself in a stash house haunted, like ‘The Conjuring,’” Longoria said.
The crew is composed of many Rio Grande Valley natives, including Longoria who’s from La Joya and Negrete who is from Edinburg.
“So today is the actual first full day of actually going through everything,” Longoria said. “It’s going to be shot non-chronologically. So it’s just about best matching where we’re at with the film. But it’s really exciting in that there’s just a lot of forward momentum with it.”
The entire film will feature locations throughout Mercedes, including the old City Hall and Fire House Building on South Ohio Avenue.
Longoria said that the city of Mercedes, which was designated as a Film Friendly Texas Certified Community in March, has been very supportive with the production. He said that “El Jardin” is the first production in the city since its designation.
“It wasn’t an immediate choice because, you know, you hear about other cities, but when they started like that designation, we reached out, our team reached out, and they were so quick to just take on that like ‘let’s do this,’” Longoria said. “We get the opportunity to really set the tone for like, what does a film-friendly city do? It’s been such an honor to work with them and collaborate with them. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.”
He described the production as a sort of homecoming for a lot of the crew — lauding the talent in the Rio Grande Valley for filmmakers.
“There is no longer that sort of like I guess mindset that in the ’90s, like there’s nothing here,” Longoria said. “No, absolutely, that source of creativity and forward momentum comes here and then comes back. And I think about what potential this film has.”
Negrete said that they decided to have the production take place in the Rio Grande Valley because he felt it is important to be able to tell stories in a part of the country that often gets overlooked.
He added that there is a need for more representation from Latino filmmakers to better tell their stories.
“We’ve seen a lot of productions and other projects come out of Hollywood and try to tell our stories for us,” Negrete said. “I think a lot of times they’re not from here and they’re trying to tell stories that aren’t theirs. I think whenever they try to connect with those audiences, we really don’t connect with them because we go, ‘That’s not really what the Valley looks like,’ or ‘That isn’t really what it would be like.’
I think we, especially all along the entire population in the Chicano culture, growing up on a border Hispanic — it is such an underserved community.”
He said that the production wanted to showcase the well of talent and opportunity available not only in the Valley but in Texas through the film. While many of the crew members have gone off to larger markets to fulfill their dreams of movie production, he said that there is a shared longing for many to return to their home and shine a light on the region that shaped them.
“We wanted to come back, connect with the people that are here, and make something that’s important,” Negrete said. “I think really our goal was at the end of the summer we wanted to make something that all of us were really proud of, not just the final product, but also the way that we went about it because that was really important to all of us.”
Longoria said that he hopes to enter the film in a few film festivals and host some private screenings before debuting locally within a year.
Anyone interested in updates, including teasers to be shared in the near future, is encouraged to follow the film’s Instagram account @eljardin.film.