She doesn’t like his slow strange music. She says it sounds like the batteries are dying, (and so are hers). “If it’s slower it lasts longer. I believe that when it’s slower you feel it more.” Ulises, a million years from home (“on the other side”) with no prospect of going back, explains to a Colombian prostitute old enough to be his mother why he loves the thing he loves more than most people love anything.

Ulises is from Monterrey, Mexico, and the thing he loves is a certain kind of music, and in particular, he loves dancing to that music. The music is specific to his home, to a place and a time, and the dancing he does, which is beautiful, full of weight and meaning, is the driving force in his life and in the life of his friends — it binds them together as a community. I’m No Longer Here/Ya no estoy aquí is a film from 2019 directed by Fernando Frías de la Parra, and starring Juan Daniel García Treviño. As the scrolling titles tell us at the beginning of the movie, this film takes place “some time ago” in northeast Mexico, specifically in Monterrey, where “a counterculture movement known for its love of Cumbia flourished. It called itself Kolumbia.” The culture is built around a type of music called cumbia rebajada, and like many great movements in art and music, it was discovered by accident. While Sonido Dueñez was deejaying a party his amplifier malfunctioned, causing the music to slow down, the notes to stretch out, and the voices to lower, in a sort of melting version that might be the soundtrack to a dream or a half-forgotten memory. To Dueñez’s surprise, people loved it and began bringing him music to slow down for them. He and his wife made cassettes full of slowed-down cumbia music from Colombia, and a culture was born.

The Kolumbia kids dress in huge baggy clothes and wear their hair like Roman warrior helmets, with a stiff short mohawk and hair drawn together under their chins. They wander the narrow streets of Monterrey, doing all the things teenagers do all over the world — talking shit, fooling around — and they flock together in all the pigeon spaces, alleyways and vacant lots and the abandoned half-built or half-destroyed buildings that tower high above the city. And they dance, moving together in slow circles, taking turns showing off their skills. Always with a sort of reverence bordering on the religious. This is more than a pastime, this is a meditation that defines them.

The film begins with Ulises leaving. On a hill high above Monterrey, with mountains stretched along the horizon and the city sprawling below, Ulises climbs into a car that will take him away from everything he knows and loves. The narrative is disjointed, we go back and forth between Monterrey and New York City, and back and forth in time. The film is beautifully, beautifully shot, with such a balance of light and shadow, cool and warm, inside and outside, every frame worth remembering, every frame carrying the weight of memory.

In Monterrey Ulises has a gang of friends who call themselves the Terkos, which is defined in the film as “obstinado, irreductible, firmeo, inamovible en su attitude,” or stubborn, resistant to change regarding his/her attitude. And much of the story is about trying to hang onto something, to hold onto a way of life and a group of friends, a sense of belonging and purpose. This sense of trying to sustain something fleeting and impermanent, a halcyon moment in life that cannot last, is familiar to many adolescents, but the feeling of fragility is heightened for the Kolumbia kids. In the labyrinth of small houses that clings to the hills high above the city there’s a ragged sense of poverty and of a community held together more by the deejay’s voice over the radio waves than by laws.

The Terkos are a youthful, cheerful gang of kids who just think about music and dancing, but other gangs vie with each other for power. They are older, harder, and more violent, and they exert a strangling hold on the neighborhood. Ulises’ older brother was in one of the gangs but he’s gone now, (the gang members remember Ulises as a child, “You couldn’t talk, but you already knew how to dance”) and we have the sense that Ulises, with his quiet power and his devotion to cumbia rebajada, is the force that separates his friends from a short life marked with violence and drugs. With a tragic sense of inevitability, it all goes wrong. Ulises is smuggled to New York City under a bus full of people on a shopping trip, and he’s told by his mother that if he returns they will all die. So he finds himself alone far from home in a strange land where he doesn’t speak the language.

In New York, he is seen as an oddity. A stranger asks if he can take Ulises’ photo for his Instagram account because he likes his “look,” but Ulises doesn’t understand the words. And as belittling as this is, it might be the kindest of responses to his clothes and hair. He is worse than misunderstood, he is bullied and mocked. He finds a miserable job working construction with men who tease him about all that makes him who he is — his hair, his music, his dancing, his silence. At home, his friends would push him onto the dance floor to demonstrate his moves, but these men push him towards the subway tracks as a cruel joke. And eventually they beat him and leave him bloodied in a subway car. So he seeks the pigeon spaces in New York as well, and he squats in a shed on a rooftop above the railroad tracks. He’s befriended by a chatty girl about his age, and she’s not unkind, she genuinely tries to understand him and learn his language. But somehow the gap between her life and expectations and his is the most painful of all. She takes him to a party where kids his age dance, as kids his age do all over the world, and it sends him into despair. It seems as though Ulises sees no depth, no value, no reverence, and this opens a sinkhole of loss and loneliness. When you’re an artist, when you care about something very much and have no one to share it with, the world can feel very cold.

He tries to stay connected with his friends from Monterrey, but he only catches glimpses, and there’s nothing he can do to hold things together, he can only watch as they seem to be falling apart. He tries to dance on the streets and subway platforms to earn money, but nobody understands this thing he cares about so much, and he’s moved along every time. Though at first he can’t go home, eventually he’s forced to go home. He’s deported, and he returns to a landscape utterly and terribly changed.

In an early scene in the film, Ulises walks Monterrey’s winding streets, and you can tell he feels good in his neighborhood. He feels on top of the world. He’s followed by an older man asking for beer money, who acts as a sort of chorus. As he trails behind Ulises, he sings a song, “I think I saw you dancing one day, I think I saw you showing off, at the square of my hometown, dancing cumbia, dancing cumbia, and I remember that melody, I remember dancing you told me, how sweet this is, how sweet this is.” At the end of the film Ulises, with his hair cut off, walks those same streets to the top of the hill and looks down on chaos below him. He turns his music player on and dances his slow dance, above it all. And then his batteries die, and all we hear is sirens.

I’m No Longer Here is available to watch on Netflix. Here is a mix of Sonido Dueñez’s rebajadas on YouTube.