The absence of its star, the Mexican “sex-influencer” Lalo Santos, stirred up a controversy at the presentation in the Official Selection yesterday of Pornomelancolía, a film based on Santos’s real life directed by the Argentine Manuel Abramovich.

The film is a docufiction that reflects the loneliness of its main character and combines the home-made porn videos that Santos posts on the social networks with the shooting of another film, Pornozapata, that was filmed in his real life in which he plays a gay Emiliano Zapata who has sex with various characters such as Pancho Villa.

Santos claimed that he had not come to the screening because he didn’t agree with the conditions in which the film had been made and said that it had affected his mental health. For his part Abramovich explained at the press conference he held after the screening of his film that: “In my films I’m interested in encouraging people to become characters. I think that we all live by playing characters in order to survive.”