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.

Brilliant Soil

By custom, thousands of artisans in Mexico still use lead based glazes in their pottery without knowing the damage that this toxic element causes to their health.

Herlinda, an indigenous Purepecha potter, is one of the few artisans in her community who uses alternative lead-free glazes. Having achieved safer and healthier living conditions for her family, she faces the difficult task of finding a market for her impressive pieces.

But this does not dull her dreams of having her shop thrive and her brothers return from the United States to rejoin the family tradition.

An unexpected trip could crystallize this dream.

Mariachi Gringo

A stifled, small-town man stuck in a dead end life, runs away to Mexico to be a mariachi singer. MARIACHI GRINGO is a musical tour-de-force exploring the reality of "following your dreams" across cultural, personal, social and geographical borders.

Tour de Cine Frances

The French Film Tour is a traveling festival that presents the best selection of contemporary French films in original version with subtitles around Mexico and Central America, before its commercial release. It also includes the presentation of short films produced by IMCINE Mexicans in the last year.

Tour de Cine Frances

Mexican short films list in English:
•Under the sun , Arcadi Palerm
•Clarissa , Victor Audiffred
•When awake , of Del Arenal Yoame Escamilla
•Defective , Gabriela Garza and Jon Fernández Martínez López
•Inside one of Salvador Aguirre
•Any Given Sunday , Claudia de la Cabada
•The wound of Lucretia , Sabrina Maldonado
•Huellita of Ehécatl Garcia
•Ismael , of Sebastian Hofmann
•The jazz , Andres Peralta
•Lucy vs. limits of voice , Monica Herrera
•The wheel , Karla Castañeda
•One eye , Lorenza Manrique
•Fifteen years , Liliana Torres
•Shui , Barbara Balsategui
•He dreams of Ana Zamboni
•Tintico evenings , Alejandro Garcia Caballero
•The Tiricia or how to cure sadness of Cruz Angeles
•The last board of Jansen Itandehui

In Spanish
•Bajo el sol, de Arcadi Palerm
•Clarissa, de Víctor Audiffred
•Cuando despierte, de Yoame Escamilla Del Arenal
•Defectuosos, de Gabriela Martínez Garza y Jon Fernández López
•Dentro de uno, de Salvador Aguirre
•Un domingo cualquiera, de Claudia de la Cabada
•La herida de Lucrecia, de Sabrina Maldonado
•Huellita, de Ehécatl García
•Ismael, de Sebastián Hofmann
•El jazz, de Andrés Peralta
•Lucy vs. los límites de la voz, de Mónica Herrera
•La noria, de Karla Castañeda
•Un ojo, de Lorenza Manrique
•Quince años, de Liliana Torres
•Shui, de Bárbara Balsategui
•Sueña, de Ana Zamboni
•Las tardes de Tintico, de Alejandro García Caballero
•La tiricia o cómo curar la tristeza, de Ángeles Cruz
•El último consejo, de Itandehui Jansen

Innocent Voices

Voces Inocentes (English title: Innocent Voices) is a 2004 Mexican film directed by Luis Mandoki. The plot is set during the Salvadoran Civil War in 1980, and is based on writer Óscar Torres's childhood. The film serves as a general commentary on the military use of children. The movie also shows injustice against innocent people who are forced to fight in the war. It follows the story of the narrator, a boy named Chava.

Official Trailer

Regarding Luis Bunuel

Luis Buñuel
by Dominique Russell

Dominique Russell teaches in the Spanish, Film and Comparative Literature programs at the University of Western Ontario (London, Canada).

Luis Buñuel was a singular figure in world cinema, and a consecrated auteur from the start. Born almost with cinema itself, his work moves from surrealist experimentation in the 1920s, through commercial comedies and melodrama in the 1950s, to postmodernist cine d’art in the 1960s and ’70s. Claimed for France, where he made his celebrated early and late films, for Spain, where he was born and had his deepest cultural roots, and for Mexico, where he became a citizen and made 20 films, he has more recently been seen as a figure in permanent exile who problematises the very idea of the national in his films.

Luis Buñuel article (long)



YouTube 10 part short film, "Regarding Luis Bunuel"

Sin Nombre - 2009

Making its world premiere at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, Sin Nombre is an epic dramatic thriller from award-winning director Cary Fukunaga.

Seeking the promise of America, a beautiful young Honduran woman, Sayra (Paulina Gaytan), joins her father and uncle on an odyssey to cross the gauntlet of the Latin American countryside en route to the United States. Along the way she crosses paths with a teenaged Mexican gang member, El Casper (Edgar M. Flores), who is maneuvering to outrun his violent past and elude his unforgiving former associates. Together they must rely on faith, trust and street smarts if they are to survive their increasingly perilous journey towards the hope of new lives.

IMDb review of Sin Nombre

Canoa - 1976

Based on a true story, this movie shows the great differences within Mexico rural and urban areas. Modernity could not be accepted in the rural areas, basically because the ignorant peasants were dominated by certain groups, including, like in this movie, the Catholic Church. Let's remember that the student massacres that had happened in 1968 and 1972 were still fresh in the minds of many Mexicans. Those students had been accused by the Government, of being Comunists. In this particular movie 5 young students of the Capital's State University decide to climb a volcano. Because of bad weather they have to stay overnight in a little village beside the Volcano. The local Priest assumes that they are Communists coming to agitate in his territory and accuses them with the people of trying to close the Church. The mob tries to lynch them. The beauty of this film resides in the fact that fanaticism is shown at its maximum level so as to make us think where this can lead us in our lives. This is true of the corrupt authorities, the Priest that uses Religion to maintain his privileges, the village people that mix Religion and fanaticism, etc. It is a great sociological study of the consequences of these extreme attitudes.

  Canoa Completa

El Bulto - 1991

Gripping psychological/cultural view of changes in Mexico from the sixties to the eighties.

A modern or post-modern Rip Van Winkel story of as much relevance to the US or Europe as it is to Mexico and Latin America. A young protester of the sixties era is caught up in a demonstration and savagely beaten by government-sponsored thugs. Nursed by his loving wife and children, he awakens and must confront the both the changes and the continuities in the society that he has missed participating or viewing in the intervening period.

This is one of the best films on the impact of the rebellion of the sixties on contemporary society in any language or culture. While the literate US public has some knowledge of the protests in the United States, France, and possibly Czechoslavakia, it is not known generally that Mexico also had a great protest tradition and was rocked by a major student rebellion. In this film, directed and acted in by the creative and accomplished Mexican cinema and theater producer, Gabriel Retes, an activist who was badly beaten and in a quasi-coma for around two decades, awakens in the new world of the contemporary post-sixties and must come to terms with it. A Rip Van Winkel story for the postmodern era, fascinating and intriguing, highly recommended.

El Bulto - Part 1 of 12 on YouTube

Baja California: the Pacific Coast of Mexico - 1949

Silas Johnson is another "lost filmmaker, who worked out of Coronado, California. This film boasts beautiful color footage of old Baja, before Pemex stations lined the Cuota and Libre. Hunt travels from Ensenada to Cabo San Lucas, enchantingly stopping at the waterless village of Magdalena Bay, Tortuga Bay, and the vineyards at Santo Tomás.

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The Beast of Hollow Mountain - 1956

Plot: An American cowboy living in Mexico discovers his cattle is being eaten by a giant prehistoric dinosaur

Review: When it came to dinosaur special effects in the 1950s, absolutely no one came close to Ray Harryhausen, and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms still reigns as the classic of that time. Others who dared try and compete were lucky to come in a distant second, but that didn't mean there wasn't a fun quality to their films. The Beast From Hollow Mountain is one of those minor league yet highly enjoyable attempts to combine the two favorite elements of 12 to 15 year old boys when we went to the movies back in the mid-fifties: cowboys and dinosaurs. We knew Guy Madison well from his long run Wild Bill Hickock TV series, which had precious little to do with the real life of that historic character but was plenty of fun all the same. Here, he's a range rider who discovers that his cattle are disappearing. Could it be outlaws? No, the title creature, who attacks Madison, a cute little Mexican kid, the gorgeous Patricia Medina, and a whole host of vaqueros. There is (as was the case back then) precious little dinosaur footage, for the way they kept costs down back then was to 'tease' you with distant growls, but avoid showing you the real thing for as long as possible. After about an hour of this, you got maybe fifteen minutes of actual footage with the creature (who has the weirdest, wildest tongue of any dinosaur in movie history) chasing after Guy and friends with the swiftness of a professional track star. And it's a good thing they keep him offscreen, because he's at best semi-convincing when you do see him. That doesn't make this brightly colored film and less fun to watch. And the way in which Madison gets the thing at the end is a real lulu.

La Mujer del Puerto - 1934

Plot Summary: Rosario (Palma) becomes a prostitute after losing her father and discovering her boyfriend had a liaison with another woman. In Veracruz, Rosario lives above a sordid cabaret "selling her love to the men coming from the sea." One night, sailor Alberto (Soler) rescues Rosario from the dirty hands of a drunk man. They get along and go to Rosario's room. After making love, they begin to talk and Rosario discovers they're siblings...

Starting with the leading performance from the first diva in Mexican cinematography according to some (Andrea Palma), without forgetting Domingo Soler who also makes a great contribution to the cast in this film, then the great strength of the plot and the masterful direction by Arcady Boytler. All in all this movie cannot be considered less than excellent. So yes, maybe some of the scenes don't result quite the way they should, but most of them do. Particularly the scene from the carnival at the beginning of the movie and the last scene bring you to the verge of tears. Yes it also many elements of a catholic moral (Rosario lives in guilt, her way of paying her sins is by means of sacrifice), but we have to consider the movie was released in 1934 and the Mexican society of the time had those values dictating our lives and, weather we take this into consideration or not, I think the the plot is really really tough and the theme very strong. Maybe nowadays we have many movies with plots that are twice or thrice as tough, but I think this is still a great, great movie and has no soap opera can never even remotely compare with it. Also, it is one of the first movies with recorded sound in the Mexican film industry.

Que Viva Mexico!

Que Viva Mexico! - Da zdravstvuyet Meksika! (1979)

Plot Outline: Eisenstein shows us Mexico in this movie, its history and its culture. He believes, that Mexico can become a modern state.

User Comments: Even if it would have been completed, I would bet that it would be considered one of Eisenstein's lesser works

Que Viva Mexico is an interesting (reconstruction of a) film by Sergei Eisenstein, the director of so many masterpieces. In fact, of all that I have seen, this is the only non-masterpiece of the bunch. Even the reconstruction of Beshin Meadow I like more. Que Viva Mexico is a semi-documentary. Most of it is uninteresting and, unlike Eisenstein's other films and Tisse's other cinematography, poorly composed. The only parts of real interest come near the end, with the rebellion, something that Eisenstein was used to creating on screen. There is a great gunfight with a woman participating, a precursor to Alexander Nevsky's Vasilisa, and there is a great scene where some rebels are buried up to the shoulders underground and then trampled by horses (by far the best scene in the film). The Day of the Dead celebration is also very interesting. There is also a bullfight that will demonstrate just how cruel bullfighting is.

I do have to complain about the reconstruction that I watched. This was supposed to be a silent film, I believe. The narration I did not mind, for Eisenstein would have had to find a way to communicate what the narrator did anyway. And the music is good, often great. But I object to the insertion of diagetic sound effects, like guns shooting and horses galloping. This is ridiculous. Obviously the only people who are ever going to see this film are Eisenstein enthusiasts, so to try to sell it to the public as a sound movie is ridiculous. Why?

Midaq Alley

El Callejon de los Milagros (1998) - Midaq Alley

Plot Summary: Based on the Nobel Prize Winner's novel, the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz. The story, translated from El Cairo to Mexico City's downtown, narrates the life of the members of the neighbourhood and the connection between them Don Ru, the owner of the local pub; Eusebia, his wife; Guicho, his son and Abel his friend, who emigrate to USA in search of fortune; Susanita, the single landtender always dreaming to marry a good man; Jimmy, the pub's employee, who extracts the money when Don Ru is not there and finally marries Susanita; Alma, the very good looking girl, the Abel's dream, who becomes a luxury prostitute while he's away, etc. This movie won the Ariel (the Mexican Oscar) as best movie in 1995.

The lives of the inhabitants of El Callejon de los Milagros, in downtown Mexico City, are closely knitted as the threads of a rug. Fifty-something Don Ru (Gomez Cruz) owns a small "cantina" where all the men spend afternoons playing domino. He's tired of his longtime marriage with Eusebia (Casanova) and has recently discovered new feelings inside his heart. It doesn't matter if these feelings are not aimed to a young lady but to a young clerk (Soberanes): after all, as one of the characters says, "it's platonic love". Don Ru's son Chava (Bernal) doesn't like what he sees and almost kills his father's lover. Running away from Don Ru's anger, Chava escapes to the USA with his friend Abel (Bichir) who's deeply in love with beautiful Alma (Hayek), the daughter of Dona Cata (Rojo), a tarot reader with bad luck in love. Susanita (Sanz), the ugly landlady looking for love; Guicho (Tovar), Don Ru's cinic employee, Maru (Scanda), Don Fidel (Obregon), Dona Flor (Morett), Zacarias (Woolrich) and mean Jose Luis (Gimenez Cacho) complete the cast of characters of this complex portrait of lives.

Naturaleza Viva Frida (1986)

Naturaleza Viva Frida (1986)

Plot Summary: The most prominent female painter of Latin America, Frida Kahlo, is agonizing in her Coyoacan home. She evokes memories of her childhood, of the streetcar accident that caused her terrible pain and affliction, her friendship with Trotsky and painter Alfaro Siqueiros, her marriage to Diego Rivera, her miscarriage, her political commitment, her love affairs and the anticipated exhibition of her works.

Frida is the story of a woman who has an obsession with the physical image of herself. During the course of the movie she suffers from a profound identity crisis. The viewer will immediately notice the lack of dialogue in this film. The absence of dialogue represents the fact that communication for Frida is visual, not verbal. Her works of art speak for her as she communicates her pain and suffering through her paintings. Frida Kahlo's obsession with her physical abnormalities drives her to paint herself disfigured and in pain and directly reflects her personal suffering. The viewer realizes that art is life for Frida. Art was the way in which she communicated but unfortunately, the public does not seem to get a firm understanding of her pain nor the manner in which she expressed herself.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - 1974

Plot Summary: A family scandal causes a wealthy and powerful Mexican rancher to make the pronouncement--'Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia!' Two of the bounty-hunters thus dispatched encounter a local piano-player in their hunt for information. The piano-player does a little investigating on his own and finds out that his girlfriend knows of Garcia's death and last resting place. Thinking that he can make some easy money and gain financial security for he and his (now) fiancée, they set off on this goal. Of course, this quest only brings him untold misery, in the form of trademark Peckinpah violence.

User Comments: There was probably no greater director in the U.S. from 1969-1974 than Sam Peckinpah. He made seven films, ranging from classics (The Wild Bunch) to superior genre pics (The Getaway). And before his career began sliding, he had one more masterpiece in him: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. This is the story of one man's alcohol-fueled journey into dissolution and redemption and a really strange film. Warren Oates plays Benny, a piano player cajoled by a pair of men into finding Alfredo's head. See, Alfredo impregnated the daughter of a vicious landowner, and now he wants him dead. But this isn't really what the film is about. It's more about Benny, and how his journey costs him everything. Warren Oates is wonderful as Benny, and there are some great darkly comic moments between him and the head. And this is one of Michael Medved's 50 worst movies of all time - what more of a recommendation do you require? Seriously, this is a great film.

Mexico headless adventure
IMDb review

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