Three years after Hurricane Otis tore through Acapulco and killed at least 52 people, a big-budget Mexican film about two sailors who rode out the storm on their boats will open in theaters next month.

The film, Surviving Hurricane Otis, was directed by Jorge Michel Grau, 53, and produced by Netflix and the Mexican studio Perro Azul. It is fiction built on fact. The real sailors, Marlon Valdez and Jonathan Chico, withstood winds that destroyed buildings, uprooted trees and dislodged entire hillsides; Michel Grau read their story in the newspaper EL PAÍS and, he said, it “blew my mind.”

“It was a project that was unheard-of for national cinema, for the budgets of national cinema and, above all, for the worldview of what we do,” the director said in an interview with EL PAÍS. “It felt prohibitive to think about films that big, but then you realize there are trained professionals here, and we have the capability to make films of that size.”

Over three years, 800 people worked on the film, 500 of them on visual effects alone. “There was a whole army of people creating sea water, waves and wind, layer upon layer,” Michel Grau said. Simulating a Category 5 hurricane, with winds of 170 miles per hour, on a soundstage was the production’s central technical problem.

“A film about a natural disaster of this scale had never been made in Mexico,” he said. His own earthquake film 7:19, he said, was “at a budget level you would view as independent cinema.”

At Churubusco studios in Mexico City, the crew built a 200-square-meter water tank and three eight-ton boats, and used fans and water cannons. A graphics schedule tracked how the wind shifted and the sea rose at every moment of the storm. “We knew at what time the wind blew and in which direction, and that’s how we filmed it,” Michel Grau said. “So in the film you see, minute by minute, how the hurricane approached, how it trapped them, how it ripped them from the pier and later returned them.”

“Them” is Whirpul and Cándido, the half-brothers of the script, standing in for Valdez and Chico, who are not brothers but are best friends. The two real sailors advised the writers, worked with the actors, checked the radio codes between boats and helped in postproduction. They also appear in one scene: they are the voices on the radio when the hurricane hits. “It was playing with metafiction,” Michel Grau said. “We were telling a story in which they were actually there.”

“It was a really great process,” Chico said by phone, from “talking with the writers and the director, telling the story again and again” to “doing our super cameo.” Both sailors are now 27. Neither returned to the sea after Otis. Valdez works at a hotel in Playa del Carmen; Chico is a software developer in Mexico City.

The filmmakers also interviewed other Otis survivors and members of Civil Protection, the Navy and the National Meteorological System, an investigation Michel Grau called exhaustive. The goal, he said, was to make the hurricane the film’s least important element. “We wanted people to see themselves on screen, so that even if you might be distracted by the special effects and the hurricane, you wouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is a Mexican just like you up on that boat.”

One angle of that identity is inequality. When Otis hit Acapulco on the night of Oct. 25, 2023, dozens of captains, sailors, mechanics and hostesses were aboard boats, sent by yacht and sailboat owners to watch over them, a practice known as “velar.” Otis’s arrival was known, and most of the vessels were insured. Twenty-four sailors remain missing.

That fact gave the film what Michel Grau called an antagonist who wasn’t the storm. “In reality the hurricane isn’t a villain,” he said. “It’s an event that exposes these social divisions and disparities and makes them personal.”

After its run in theaters, the film will be distributed on Netflix. “Whoever watches it will find a hurricane film,” Michel Grau said, “but above all they will find Mexico.”