Mexico brings feast of films to ¡Viva el Cine Mexicano!

Mexico brings feast of films to ¡Viva el Cine Mexicano!
By Doug Sarti

This year is an auspicious one for Mexico, marking 200 years of independence from Spain and 100 years since the start of the Mexican Revolution. With both wars seminal events in the nation’s history, it’s the perfect time for reflection as well as celebration.

To help commemorate these anniversaries locally comes ¡Viva el Cine Mexicano!, a comprehensive new retrospective of the best and most fascinating in Mexican film.

“The Mexican government is doing a lot of celebrations abroad,” festival organizer Victor Martinez Aja says by phone, explaining how he was approached by the local Mexican consulate to help set up the festival. “The main idea was to celebrate these two significant milestones in Mexican history through film.”

Running from February 10 to 21 at the Pacific Cinémathèque, the copresentation by the Consulate General of Mexico and the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival covers the Mexican film industry’s 75-year history through 15 carefully selected films. Almost all genres are covered in the retrospective, which ranges from the golden age of Mexican films in the 1930s to today’s nuevo cine Mexicano.

"In the end of the ’80s and beginning of the ’90s we have this big wave with Carlos Carrera, Jorge Fons, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Maria Novaro," Aja explains, naming some of Mexico’s most talented contemporary filmmakers, all of whom are represented in the retrospective. "All these films really mark a new way of the Mexican Cinema."

This creative renaissance has happily brought a renewed sense of purpose to the Mexican film industry. "I see a really good future for the Mexican cinema in the next ten or twenty years," Aja says, describing the timely confluence of talent, government incentives, and decreasing production costs. "It’s a natural progression, more professionalized. And nowadays, to produce a film, it’s becoming cheaper. If you shoot in HD, you can still have a great quality film".

Also helpful is the recently-passed Law 226, which allows private investors in Mexico to write off 10 percent of their taxes through film investments. And, as another bonus, the increase in film production provides great training and experience for the next generation of Mexican filmmakers. "It’s a great school" Aja says thoughtfully.

The festival’s opening-night film, Jorge Fons’s Midaq Alley (1995), offers a bold introduction to this new wave of Mexican filmmakers. The winner of more than two dozen awards, the film features Salma Hayek in an early pre-Hollywood role and presents its story through three different points of view, following a group of intertwining lives in Mexico City.

Other screenings of the nuevo cine Mexicano include Guillermo del Toro’s first movie, Cronos (1993), a revisionist vampire tale that hints at the director’s later grand visions; Lola (1989), a thoughtful rumination on the mother-daughter relationship; and Benjamin’s Woman (1991), about a May-December romance, a kidnapping, and a number of unforeseen consequences. There’s also the closing night’s Silent Light (2007), Carlos Reygadas’s starkly beautiful story of temptation set in a Mexican Mennonite community. The film has the unusual combination of nonprofessional actors and dialogue in the Low German dialect of Plautdietsch, but it all comes together flawlessly in what Roger Ebert named one of that year’s best pictures. Elevating the film even further is Reygadas’s haunting imagery, a pastoral vision that evokes both Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and Peter Weir’s Witness.

For fans of the classics, there’s Luis Buñuel’s The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955). Although born in Spain, the groundbreaking surrealist did some of his best work while living in Mexico, including this arresting offering. It starts—and ends—as a relatively routine melodrama. The noirish middle, however (like Hitchcock’s Spellbound on mescaline), takes some decidedly creepy turns and amply illustrates some of Buñuel’s famous fetishes.

Also playing is the beautifully shot Salón México (1949), a beloved and stylish drama from director Emilio Fernández about a dance-hall girl. Renowned for its realistic portrayals of both its characters and as a document of a vanished Mexico, the film is also treasured for Gabriel Figueroa’s lush cinematography.

For the politically motivated, there are Fernando de Fuentes’s classic El Compadre Mendoza (1934), the tale of an opportunistic landowner during the revolution, and Paul Leduc’s Reed: Insurgent México (1973), a docudrama about Ten Days That Shook the World author John Reed and his time with Pancho Villa.

“Mexico has a lot of history,” Aja says, “and you can see it here in these films, how the actors, in their own way, managed to go to those places and re-create the time.” Case in point: the second Leduc offering, Frida (1984), stylishly documents the post-revolution life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her two famous lovers, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky.

“It’s a banquet of films,” Aja says enthusiastically. “Whatever you like, I’m pretty sure you’re going to find it, and you’ll definitely learn a lot about Mexican society over the last 75 years.”