Theme

A TEQUILA WITH GOD is a feature-length docudrama examining whether redemption, salvation, and resurrection are possible even in the most unlikely of places, as in the middle of a drug war in Tijuana, México.

Your guardian angel might visit you in the most unexpected form. So might the Devil.

Film Statement

A TEQUILA WITH GOD is a tale built around an altar boy, Hector, who at the age of 12 was lured into the gang and became a hard-core criminal and consequently spent 22 years in prison and ended up as a heavy heroin addict. After he sank unfathomably low he decided to kill himself by overdose. He injected three times more heroin than should have been enough to kill him, but he survived!

God, whom Hector had been challenging for most of his crime-ridden life, answered Hector’s last defiant call by appearing to him at the very moment he should have died. That was the moment of change, in which Hector broke with the ghosts of his past, got clean, and since that day serves God as the most convincing servant the Lord has ever had on Earth, a humble man who now works as director of the Casa de Restauración (House of Restoration), an addict recovery home in Tijuana.

Hector is a true warrior of God, in a constant battle against the Devil and his temptations. Hector might be seen as having been redeemed, but the other main character, Mark, certainly is not. He’s a dark ghost invoking the past, challenging and casting a shadow over Hector's redemption.

An anarchist, Mark is a bitter man. His life has been an utter disappointment, and he believes that now is his last chance to make the impact he failed to leave throughout his life. America’s “total surveillance society,” as he calls it, prompts him to travel to Tijuana, where he builds a bomb he plans to detonate at Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York.

Determined to go out with a bang and not with a whimper, Mark’s intention is to use his passionate denunciation of God as a fraudulent invention by the masters of society, who use this deception for profit. But when his path crosses Hector’s, a man whom he sees as a delusional Jesus freak, he finds yet another, more imminent challenge: how to turn a reformed man of God back to Devil and use him for his own anarchistic purposes.

Background and Need

One would be hard pressed to argue that the current state of human consciousness, to paraphrase Václav Havel, is not taking humanity towards catastrophe--be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization. In such an environment the idea of God and what God means to us is more polarizing than ever.

In the United States of America, for example, the largest religion is Christianity, practiced by the majority of the population (76% in 2008), while at the same time there is still a group that “lots of Americans just don’t like much: atheists. Those who don’t believe in God are widely considered to be immoral, wicked and angry,” stated The Washington Post on May 4, 2011. That same group—atheists—despite the bigotry, is the fastest growing minority group in the United States.

A TEQUILA WITH GOD places the everlasting struggle between Good and Evil on a more personal level of a character who has done evil and has since found good. It reveals a human story that touches us all, much as Christ touched him. Through the individual destinies of a born-again Christian and his atheistic, devilish nemesis, the movie examines the relationship with the God-image every human has, therefore it examines our relationship with ourselves.

A human figure that within itself holds all the loneliness of the world represents the pain our characters share, and will relate it to audiences worldwide. The will to escape the pain is universal; only the means one uses to escape it are individual.

Therefore we believe the movie’s look at the God-image’s significance in an individual life is a timely research into an eternal question.

Seeking Redemption and Salvation

Psychologically, the figure of Jesus Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything else turns dark beside it. It is, in fact, so one-sidedly perfect that it demands a psychic complement to restore the balance. This inevitable opposition led very early on to the doctrine of the two sons of God, of whom the elder was called Satanaël, the Devil.

“Human nature is capable of an infinite amount of evil, and the evil deeds are as real as the good ones. Any uncertainty about God causes a profound uneasiness in the self, for which reason the question is generally ignored because of its painfulness,” wrote Carl Gustav Jung. Hector, a man who has seen and done evil, now works for good, helping lost souls and addicts alleviate pain and find the same salvation he has found for himself.

A man who would once break your neck for a side-glance he didn’t like now offers his other cheek even when called a “Jesus freak,” and extends his hand to those in need.