David Zonana (born 22 November 1989) is a Mexican filmmaker known for his films regarding social issues, primarily featuring amateur actors.

For Rafael Aviña of Reforma, the former "takes an almost documentary distance in a case of sexual abuse and its consequences", and the latter observed "with clinical precision" the "insolence, impudence and emotional abandonment that catapults violence" of the children and adolescents from the most privileged social classes.

[2] It starred Naian González Norvind and Darío Yazbek Bernal and was selected for several film festivals, including Guanajuato, Morelia, New Orleans and Indie Grits.

[10][11] Regarding his early directing work, Zonana commented: "I did not study film, so even though the shorts may have some technical and narrative issues, they served as a way of learning and understanding myself as an auteur.

[2] In the film, Francisco (Luis Alberti), a construction worker, learns that his widowed sister-in-law will not receive any compensation after his brother dies while working on a luxurious house.

The fight for justice, combined with other incidents involving his coworkers, leads him to head an uprising which ends with the workers taking possession of the house.

[12] Zonana filmed in a house at the upscale neighborhood Jardines del Pedregal and in Jalalpa, an impoverished borough of Mexico City where the real bricklayers that joined the cast lived.

[14] At the end of that year, Mano de Obra was exhibited at the Morelia Film Festival, an important event for the director since "the Mexican public is always the priority", Zonana stated to Proceso.

While editing Mano de Obra, Zonana began writing the first draft for his following film, Heroico, with a plot following a first-year cadet at an unnamed school resembling the Heroic Military Academy, the training center for officers of the Mexican Army.

[20] As a consequence of the Army being extremely hermetic, with very limited access to inside information,[21] Zonana pursued realism, since "Today more than ever, Mexico finds itself deeply attached to the military world.

Approaching this subjects taking liberties was not an option, as it would be irresponsible for the first film that sheds light upon the most powerful and secretive institution in the country, to be fallacious.

[21] Reviewing the Sundance World Dramatic competition, Robert Daniels of RogerEbert.com declared the film as "the boldest swing against an institution that we’ve seen in quite some time".