Surviving Hurricane Otis: Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau crafts ambitious film about two sailors who lived to tell the tale

Three years ago, a category-five hurricane devastated the Mexican resort of Acapulco. Amid images of a shattered city, the impossible emerged: the story of sailors who survived Otis on their boats. Marlon Valdez and Jonathan Chico’s feat was to withstand the winds that destroyed buildings, uprooted trees and dislodged entire hillsides, killing at least 52 people and leaving 31 missing, most of them sailors like them. Jorge Michel Grau, 53, read their story in EL PAíS and it “blew my mind. ” From that starting point he built a work of fiction, Surviving Hurricane Otis, focusing on “two ordinary people who face the extraordinary.