DAY 2 @LondonMexFest: Programme Highlights (Films, Talks, Music…)

FILM:
Abel
2010 / Mexico / 35mm / Color / 82 min
Directed by Diego Luna
Sundance Film Festival (USA, 2010)
Mute Abel is no ordinary nine-year-old. He is coming home after spending time in a psychiatric facility, having reacted badly to his father’s disappearance two years earlier. Then suddenly Abel decides to speak again and alarmingly reinvents himself as the patriarch of the house. When his father suddenly reappears, however, the  a

Mexican Cinema Tries to Make People Stupid, Director Says

Mexican cinema died in the 1960s and was later reborn as a commercial formula based on TV shows, which set out to “dehumanize people and make them stupid,” Mexican director Iria Gomez Concheiro said.
“Mexican cinema died in the ‘60s, leaving behind one style in search of another much more commercial,” Gomez Cocheiro told a press conference over the weekend during the 21st edition of the Cine Ceara Ibero-American Film Festival, now being held at the Brazilian city of Fortaleza.
A new generation of young filmmakers is coming on the scene with the virtue of “doing things very differently,” the director said, but she criticized the lack of discussion about movies, the lack of “serious reviews,” and the lack of “trained critics.”

Hollywood titles gobbling up Mexican cinemas

Theater chains in Mexico are enjoying a record-breaking year in admissions, yet homegrown fare continues to struggle at the box office.

Exhibitors here expect to close out the year with 191 million tickets sold, which positions Mexico as the world’s fifth largest exhibition market in terms of attendance figures, according to an annual report by the National Film Chamber. The report ranks Mexico fifth behind India, the U.S., China and France.

RiverRun Film Fest starts tomorrow with Mexican flavour

This year’s RiverRun International Film Festival – which starts Tomorrow in Winston-Salem — will live up to the “international” part of its title by putting a spotlight on Mexican movies.

Andrew Rodgers, the festival’s director, said that for the 2010 festival, organizers wanted to include a “curated sidebar,” with experts introducing each of the films and discussing their importance.

Drugs and murder fuel ‘narco cinema’

Part of complete coverage on VBS.TV

For this installment of the Vice Guide to Film series, VBS co-founder Shane Smith traveled to Texas, Tijuana and Mexico City to immerse himself in the seedy, fast-paced, and vastly prolific and amusing world of films inspired by – and often funded by – Mexico’s ultraviolent drug cartels, a genre known as narco cinema.

Mexico has long been the superhighway of drugs into North America. It supplies most of the meth, marijuana, cocaine and poppy derivatives consumed in the United States, and today the Mexican drug trade is a $100 billion a year industry. About 30 percent of this figure is reported to be repurposed as bribes to government officials and law enforcement.

It’s really no surprise at all that drugs permeate every level of Mexican society, from religion (yes, there is a patron saint of drug trafficking) to music, and film is by far one of the most naturally gratifying mediums for the fictitious high-flying antics of outlaw traffickers. Today there is a constant flow of B-movie releases featuring drug dealers, good cops, bad cops, women, cocaine and a lot of big trucks. These films love big trucks.

Narco cinema was born in the 1980s, taking a cue from the B-movie tradition of the Mexican cinema of the ’60s and ’70s. The movement soon turned to action, guns, trucks, cars, explosions, women, and drugs. Because 82 percent of the Mexican population can’t afford to see these films, cheap, straight-to-video accessibility helped it become increasingly popular. Watching these films is now a national pastime.

Shane decided he needed to be in one of these movies.

In time he found Enrique Morillo, one of the biggest directors in the industry, who happened at the time to be shooting two sequels to his hit “Chrysler 300” (while the eponymous vehicle is a sedan and not a truck, it does get chased by a lot of trucks in this franchise).

Morillo invited Shane to the shoot and to play a role. Shane accepted, picked up a python-skin jacket and cowboy hat and hired a band to sing drug-running songs about him for moral support. Narcocorridos, as these types of songs are called, are the musical equivalent of narco cinema, and are often the basis for many popular films.

Part of complete coverage on VBS.TV

Source: http://www.cnn.com

RiverRun Film Festival spotlights Mexican Cinema

In its 12th year, the 2010 RiverRun International Film Festival opens April 15 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The festival will screen 51 features and over 70 shorts from 33 countries, making it their most internationally diverse festival yet.  “The Extra Man,” directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini and starring Kevin Kline, Paul Dano, Katie Holmes and John C. Reilly, will open the festival on a comedic note, while the the Russian musical feature “Hipsters,” by Valery Todorovsky, will close the 11-day event.

This year’s festival will include a Spotlight on Mexican Cinema, with a showcase of prominent films in the country’s history, including the 1950 Bunuel classic “Los Olvidados”, “Like Water for Chocolate,” “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Amores Perros.”

RiverRun film festival (NC) features good Mexican cinema

RiverRun will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution with a series of films from that country, including “Like Water for Chocolate,” “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and the Bunuel classic “Los Olvidados.”

Bogdanovich will receive the festival’s Master of Cinema award following a screening of his film “Paper Moon.” Green will get the Emerging Master award after the screening of his “George Washington,” which was shot in and around Winston-Salem. His film “Pineapple Express” also will screen during the festival, which covers two weekends this year for the first time.

Kevin Kline comedy “The Extra Man” will open the 2010 RiverRun International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C., and the festival will feature a spotlight on Mexican cinema and special awards for filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich and David Gordon Green.

The festival opens on April 15 and will unspool 51 feature films and 70-plus short films from 33 countries before it wraps on April 25.

In addition to “Extra Man,” directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, “Mao’s Last Dancer,” directed by Bruce Beresford, will be the Centerpiece Premiere, and Russian musical “Hipsters” will unspool on closing night.

More information about the films and the schedule are available at www.riverrunfilm.com

Hola Mexico Film Festival back on track!

Following the success of the Hola Mexico Film Festival (HMFF) in the United States in 2009, the renowned international festival is back for the second year on US soil commencing in April 2010. The Hola Mexico Film Festival is the largest tribute to Mexican film in the world and will again showcase the creativity, ingenuity and charm of Mexican cinema in six of the nation’s most influential cities: Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington D.C.

By screening the very best of Mexican cinema, the HMFF will take you on a journey through Mexico’s past, present and future. The festival reveals hidden gems in the Mexican film industry, showcasing the talent of highly coveted directors, producers and actors that work in Mexico. Each film reflects the maturity and complexity of authentic Mexican culture, bringing forth unique story lines and characters that the audience will never forget.

Shanghai Mexican Film Festival 2010

If you know where to look, Shanghai can be a surprisingly good place to explore non-mainstream culture from around the world. This month, fans of non-English language cinema will be in for a treat with the 2010 Bicentennial Mexican Film Festival.

The festival features movies from Mexico’s golden age of cinema from the 1940s to the 1970s. Kicking off tomorrow, two films will be shown every weekend at the Cultural Section of the Spanish Consulate General in Shanghai until the end of this month.

Tucson Cine Mexico 2010 – University of Arizona – 4th/7th March

The University of Arizona’s Hanson Film Institute and The Consulate of Mexico in Tucson present Tucson Cine Mexico 2010, a festival of Mexican film. Tucson Cine Mexico 2010 is the most prominent film festival in the US focusing entirely on the work of Mexican directors, with each screening being the Arizona premiere. Tucson Cine Mexico 2010 is sponsored by Cox and Harkins Theaters. All screenings and events are free and open to the public and will take place Thursday, March 4 through Sunday, March 7, 2010.