¡VIVA EL CINE MEXICANO!

The Vancouver Latin American Film Festival is pleased to join with Pacific Cinémathèque and the Consulate General of Mexico in Vancouver in presenting ¡Viva el Cine Mexicano!, a major retrospective of classic and contemporary Mexican cinema.

This 15-film exhibition has been organized to commemorate two major Mexican milestones that will be marked in 2010: the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence, and the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. The program showcases works spanning 75 years of illustrious Mexican cinema.

Included are classics by Emilio Fernández, Fernando de Fuentes, Luis Buñuel, Paul Leduc, and Arturo Ripstein; two celebrated films dramatizing the Revolution, de Fuentes's El Compadre Mendoza (1934) and Leduc's Reed: Insurgent Mexico (1973); and key films by some of contemporary Mexican cinema's most important and acclaimed directors, including Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Carlos Carrera, Dana Rotberg, Roberto Sneider, María Novaro, and Carlos Bolado.

Many of these artists are represented by their debut or breakthrough works. Five of the films screening here won the Ariel Award (Mexico's equivalent of the Oscar) for Best First Feature; seven received the Golden Ariel for Best Film.

Our exhibition opens with Jorge Fons's multiple-prize-winning Midaq Alley (1995), which may be the most honoured Mexican film in history.

We close with Carlos Reygadas's extraordinary Silent Light (2008), one of the great films of current world cinema. (Silent Light also screens this January/February cycle in Pacific Cinémathèque's "Best of the Decade" program, as do additional features by both Cuarón and del Toro - some measure perhaps of the ascendancy, in recent years, of Mexican filmmakers to a place of true international prominence).

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