Mexican filmmaker wins Cannes award

Producer-director Michel Franco wins award for best screenplay

Mexican film director and producer Michel Franco was awarded at the Cannes Film Festival on the weekend with best screenplay for his film Chronic.

It was the second Cannes award for Franco, 35, who received the Un Certain Award in 2012 for his film, After Lucía.

During the presentation of the award on Sunday, the filmmaker said Chronic was born in Cannes three years ago when he received the Un Certain Award from actor Tim Roth. When Franco said he was working on a script about a female nurse working in palliative care, Roth told Franco that if he changed the nurse to a man he would like to do the film.

Mexico-News-Daily -- Mexican filmmaker wins Cannes award

Eisenstein in Guanajuato

Sergei  Eisenstein in Guanajuato

In 1931, at the height of his artistic powers, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein travels to Mexico to shoot a new film to be titled Que Viva Mexico. Freshly rejected by Hollywood and under increasing pressure to return to Stalinist Russia, Eisenstein arrives at the city of Guanajuato. Chaperoned by his guide Palomino Cañedo, he vulnerably experiences the ties between Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, happy to create their effects in cinema, troubled to suffer them in life. Peter Greenaways film explores the mind of a creative genius facing the desires and fears of love, sex and death through ten passionate days that helped shape the rest of the career of one of the greatest masters of Cinema.

IMDb - Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)

Cine Mexico Film Festival shares culture

Cine Mexico Film Festival shares culture
By Chelsey Wade | Published 03/27/14 11:15pm

When she arrived in Tucson years ago, Vicky Westover wondered what type of film festival would work best for the new region she would be living in. As director of the UA Hanson Film Institute, Westover organized the first Mexican film festival of contemporary directors in Tucson in 2005. The Institute, in collaboration with UA Film and Television, will show seven films this weekend for the Ninth Annual Tucson Cine Mexico Film Festival.

Westover said the festival aims to show the best in contemporary Mexican cinema while keeping a balance of subjects, directors and genres. The films will be shown in Spanish with English subtitles.

“The last 12 years [have] seen this amazing film talent come out of Mexico,” Westover said. “The festival began right at the time where people were starting to pay attention to Mexican cinema in a new golden age for Mexico.”

“La Jaula de Oro / The Golden Dream” — Friday at 7 p.m.

This drama that won the Audience Award at the 2013 Morelia International Film Festival is about three teenagers traveling to begin a different life. Director Diego Quemada-Díez tells a story of misadventures and encounters across the 1,200 mile journey from the slums of Guatemala, through Mexico and into the U.S.

Cine Mexico Film Festival shares culture

Instructions Not Included

Valentin is Acapulco's resident playboy, until a former fling leaves a baby on his doorstep and takes off without a trace. Leaving Mexico for Los Angeles to find the baby's mother, Valentin ends up finding a new home for himself and his newfound daughter, Maggie. An unlikely father figure, Valentin raises Maggie for six years, while also establishing himself as one of Hollywood's top stuntmen to pay the bills, with Maggie acting as his on-set coach. As Valentin raises Maggie, she forces him to grow up too. But their unique and offbeat family is threatened when Maggie's birth mom shows up out of the blue, and Valentin realizes he's in danger of losing his daughter - and his best friend.

El Infierno

El Infierno (English: Hell) is a 2010 Mexican action drama comedy western film produced by Bandidos Films, directed by Luis Estrada and following the line of La ley de Herodes; it's a political satire about the drug trafficking in Mexico. 

The film has been a critical and commercial success in Mexico. The film has been nominated for the 25th Goya Awards for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film. 

 Benjamín "Benny" García is deported from the United States to his hometown in Mexico (a fictional place named San Miguel Arcángel). Back home is a bleak picture, he can't find an honest job and most of the town is held with the business of drug trafficking. Benny gets involved in the narco business, a "spectacular" job where he gets a lot of money, women and fun. But soon he finds out that the violent criminal life is not easy and much less fun.