While the more than 9 million inhabitants of Mexico City They are immersed in the silence of the night, a frenetic world comes to life in the streets. They are the nocturnal heroes who, aboard private ambulances, attend to the emergencies typical of one of the most populated cities in the world. That is their way of earning a living and it is also the premise of Midnight Familythe series that hits the big screen this week AppleTV+.
“It is an unimaginable world that is revealed to us while we are peacefully asleep, the city is full of activity and full of people dedicated to saving lives and we do not even notice. A good number of people offer private ambulance services, they are not necessarily the official ones that the city offers, because they are very few in relation to the size of our city,” Joaquin Cosio explained to MILLENNIUM.
Inspired by the documentary of the same namethe series directed by Natalia Beristain, Israel Adrián Caetano, Pablo Fendrik and Gabriel Ripstein offers an intimate and revealing look at one of the latent crises in Mexico City, which forces us to rethink our dependence on a system that often leaves its heroes alone in the fight to save lives, “it is the story of our heroes so unique and the challenges they face,” Cosío said.
When the documentary When the show first aired in 2019, only 45 ambulances were part of the city’s official service, the rest were private, many of them in precarious and irregular conditions. The situation has not changed much in recent years, there are currently around 100 ambulances to serve a population of almost 10 million people; private ambulance services compete with each other to be the first to arrive at the scene of accidents.
“This is the history of our unique heroes, “It is a portrait of a typical middle-class Mexican family trying to get ahead, each one has their dreams, their goals and their expectations. We see intense family relationships, love, it is a story that has everything: action, drama, conflicts, doubts, etc. And I am very happy to be part of it,” added Joaquín Cosío, who plays the patriarch of the family of paramedics.
A harsh reality
With a hospital system almost on the verge of collapse, the private ambulances They found an opportunity. Guided by the scanners of the policeThey arrive at the scene of the crime and pick up the “patients” to take them to a private hospital in exchange for a fee; due to their irregular situation, they do not always receive their fee and are victims of extortion by the police. Despite this, many paramedics are proud of their work.
“The series “It shows us all the drama that the Tamayo family is going through, but it is inevitably a reflection of our reality,” explained Joaquín Cosío about the themes that the story addresses, “this is a portrait of our social environment, we are seeing Mexico, we are seeing this framework where everything is, we see police corruption, but we also see how this nocturnal universe moves. The series reveals this chaos to us.”
The important thing “is to make it visible,” explained Renata Vaca, who plays Marigaby, a medical student who saves lives at night with her family aboard a private ambulance. “It is difficult to realize this reality and I think we have to focus on it. It is very hard, but I think that by talking about the subject you are already doing something. I had no idea about this before watching the documentary, but it opened my eyes to this reality.”
For Diego Calvathe eldest brother of this family of night heroes, the important thing is to show the world that when there is no official support, civil society will always come out on top, “if we know that the official ambulance is not going to come, there is a lot of power in our hands as a society, together we can make a stretcher and get into the ambulance. Like it happens in earthquakes; in the end, your neighbor is the person who is going to help you.”
Paramedics of fiction
To bring the members of the Tamayo family to life, the cast trained with basic paramedic courses, “it was almost six weeks, if I remember correctly,” which they dedicated to this work under the supervision of certified medical personnel, he explained. Joaquin Cosio“We learned basic first aid and emergency care, from how to give an injection to knowing how to recognize when someone is having a heart attack.”
“Even being able to detect if the person is breathing, how to help the person breathe better, even driving an ambulance, was not easy. We went in an ambulance, we got into the Mexico Citywe were driving through the chaotic traffic of the city. There is a preparation that the production was kind enough to provide us, we were well trained and I hope that can be reflected in the series,” added the actor.
The series takes us into the city chaos, On board the Tamayo ambulance, we can see a coordinated effort, in their own way, with the aim of saving lives, while living their own. From the family drama, we can see the collective drama, the series even confronts us with moments as painful as the 2017 earthquakewhere hundreds of people lost their lives, many others managed to tell what happened thanks to the help of the medical service and the civil society.
“I had never had such an approach to medicine,” explained Renata Vaca about her character“I’m even afraid to go to the doctor, I’m always nervous and needles scare me a lot, but we spent two or three months preparing with the doctor, Sol Mendoza, who is a doctor and a paramedic, she taught us a lot, and there you saw us all sweating profusely and on the floor, doing CPR, and understanding how to work as a team.”
In Diego’s case, in addition to learning the basics of being a paramedic, he had to learn to rap. “I was very anxious. I worked with a rapper, it was something completely new. And in the case of the ambulance, the driving, the adrenaline that paramedics feel when they bring someone who is screaming in pain was tremendous. There was a small parallel in terms of the adrenaline that I felt in both situations: stage and ambulance.”
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