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.

 Midaq Alley - OPENING FILM
Salma Hayek shines in this "vibrant portrait of millennial Mexico City" (Ed Morales, Village Voice).

El Compadre Mendoza
"Exceptionally compelling. Mexican critics routinely cite it as the best film ever made in their country" (Jay Scott, Globe and Mail).

Reed: Insurgent Mexico
The fine debut feature of Paul Leduc dramatizes American journalist John Reed's accounts of the Mexican Revolution.

Love in the Time of Hysteria
This satirical sex comedy set in the age of AIDS marks the auspicious debut of director Alfonso Cuarón.

Benjamin's Woman
An offbeat, affecting reworking of the Beauty and the Beast legend set in a small Mexican town.

Castle of Purity
A bizarre, subversive drama in the Buñuelian mode.

Cronos
The startling debut feature of Guillermo del Toro, writer-director of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth.

Angel of Fire
The folkloric, the fantastic and the fatalistic memorably combine in director Dana Rotberg's award-winning second feature.

Two Crimes (aka Kissing Cousins)
A delightful comedy adapted from a novel by Jorge Ibargüengoitia: director Roberto Sneider's debut feature.

Salón México
A stylish, well acted, beautifully-shot melodrama.

Lola
A small but impressive film about the relationship between a mother and daughter.

The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
Luis Buñuel, in peak perverse form, indulges his fondness for foot fetishism and amour fou, among other obsessions, in this wicked, witty black comedy.

Frida
The film's images - some haunting, some moving, some painful,some enchanting - gradually form a mosaic of Frida Kahlo's interior and exterior life.

Under California: The Limit of Time
The extraordinary directorial debut of noted Mexican film editor Carlos Bolado won an impressive seven Ariel Awards (the Mexican Oscars).

Silent Light - CLOSING FILM
A rigorous, powerful, profoundly beautiful drama of faith and redemption that consciously evokes the metaphysical cinema of Bresson or Dreyer.

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).