Morelia International Film Festival

Mexico's Morelia Film Festival Builds Warm Community of Cinephiles

Anne Thompson — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 22:20:45 GMT

Glowing reports from the Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia (FICM) inspired me to fly down to Michoacan in late October for the 13th edition. I was not disappointed. After launching as a shorts festival, gradually director Daniela Michel and her co-founder, Cinepolis CEO Alejandro Ramírez Magaña, have added a Mexican Oscar-qualifying shorts as well as a feature competition section to a wide-ranging international program, as well as a works-in-progress showcase for international buyers, complete with cash awards. Arguably, this festival has done much to bolster Mexican filmmaking by nurturing talent, supporting talented shorts directors through their early features.

Slowly but surely Morelia has grown into a world-class festival, drawing a warm community of cinephiles who love to socialize, including a large French contingent led by fest veteran Barbet Schroeder (Cannes entry "Amnesia") and Cannes director general Thierry Frémaux, who grew up in Argentina and speaks fluent Spanish; he introduced opening night film "Crimson Peak" with an insightful tribute to Guillermo del Toro, who did not attend; he has been nervous about traveling to Mexico since the kidnapping of his father, who was released after the family paid a ransom, decades ago. Del Toro did supply a terrific program of classic Mexican horror films. (I felt safe, no matter what the hour, in Morelia.)

At one gala dinner I talked "Heaven's Gate" and Michael Cimino with festival tributee Isabelle Huppert ("Louder than Bombs") and the behind-the-scenes politics of the French Oscar submission "Mustang" with Frémaux, who was discussing classic films like "Hallejujah I'm a Bum" and his Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon with Alfonso Cuarón. He was celebrating with his entire family (including his mother) the Mexican debut of "Desierto," written and directed by his son, "Gravity" writer-turned-director Jonás Cuarón. Cinepolis is releasing the film starring Gael Garcia Bernal in Mexico, with STX Entertainment handling it stateside.

The British also attended Morelia in force, including Tim Roth (starring in Michel Franco's Cannes selection "Chronic" and Mexican Oscar entry "600 Miles"), Peter Greenaway, who wisely showed his graphic gay romance "Eisenstein in Guanajuato" at a late show (he has long lavished attention on penises in his work), and Stephen Frears, who accompanied his take on Lance Armstrong, "The Program."

On the American side, Film Society of Lincoln Center executive director Lesli Klainberg served on the doc jury, director Ondi Timoner screened "Brand: A Second Coming" (Indiewire review here) and SXSW film festival producer Janet Pierson gave a speech at a Sundance workshop. She also drove with me and several jurors to tour nearby Patzcuaro, a quaint fishing town which boasts a lovely theater renovated by Morelia's Michel and her husband, American academic ex-pat Jim (see top photo).

At the fest I caught up with animation Oscar contender "Shaun the Sheep," which was utterly comprehensible in Spanish, as was Trisha Ziff's breakout documentary "The Man Who Saw Too Much," an eye-opening portrait of intrepid tabloid news photographer Enrique Metinides, an obsessive man with an eye who turned gore into art (see trailer below). One priceless sequence reveals viewers at a New York gallery exhibit reacting with horror as they take in one of his more horrific pictures. This doc could travel; it won the Guerrero Press Award for Best Mexican Feature Length Documentary and shared the Ambulante Special Award with "El Paso," by Everardo González Reyes.

Rodrigo Pla's dramatic health-care expose "The Monster with a Thousand Heads," which starred Jana Raluy, winner of Best Actress in a Mexican feature film, reminded me of "Wild Tales," in that it's about a woman who takes her anger at the system a tad too far. I also admired one-take-wonder "Victoria," which is exhilarating (we talk to filmmaker Sebastian Schipper here), and Venezuela filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas' gay drama "From Afar" (our TIFF review here) starring veteran Alfredo Castro as an older man who is drawn to a street tough played by riveting newcomer Luis Silva. It's on the fest circuit; Angelenos can see it November 10 at AFI FEST.

I spent one day enjoying the luxurious VIP section treatment at one Cinepolis mall multiplex, where you can hang at the food court and bar when not settling into buttery leather chairs and ordering food served by attentive waiters. Cinepolis is the dominant theater chain in Latin America with over 3000 screens and is breaking into the stateside market via similar high-end theaters in Southern California.

Next time, I'd like to stay long enough to join the Day of the Dead celebration the day after Halloween, much as you see in the stunning opening sequence of "Spectre"; one couple gave me a preview.

Morelia Fest Tips Hat to María Félix, Mexican Classics and Pawel Pawlikowski

Meredith Brody — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 18:13:43 GMT

Although I saw it last year in Morelia's Arturo de Cordova retrospective, I find the opportunity to see "The Kneeling Goddess," starring María Félix as well as de Cordova, irresistible, at the Morelia International Film Festival. It's an amazing melodrama with noirish elements. Felix, something of a glorious amalgam of Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, is literally statuesque, in that a nude statue of her figures prominently in both the plot and many shots. Steven Jacobs and Lisa Colpaert, authors of "The Dark Galleries," about the paintings used in film noir and gothic melodramas, are working on another book about statues. I commend "The Kneeling Goddess" to their attention, along with Rouben Mamoulian's "The Song of Songs," with its statue of a nude Marlene Dietrich.

I especially enjoy the sequences set in a fantasy sailor's dive bar in Panama, where Felix is the singing star of a lavish revue. Unlike many of my male colleagues, I am also constantly impressed by Felix' elaborate wardrobe. Sometimes it seems that there are more costume changes than there are scenes.

I had thought that "Violet," by Luiso Berdejo, was a Mexican movie by virtue of its Los Angeles setting. But it turns out to be about chic young Spanish expatriates who live in Santa Monica and shop at the flea market at the corner of Melrose and Fairfax, where the polaroid of a beautiful blonde is found, setting a quixotic search for her in motion, despite the fact than an equally attractive young brunette woman is present in the flesh and obviously enamored of our hero.

"Darker than Midnight" (2013, by Sebastiano Riso) is part of the Semaine de la Critique program from Cannes. Its cast of young gay street kids who hang out in a park in Catania is uniformly impressive, especially the main character, an androgynous boy of 14 seeking approval outside his home. There's one astonishing traveling shot down a back alley lined with sex workers that's like a mini "Russian Ark."

"Serbian Epics" (1992) is one of the short documentaries that festival honoree Pawel Pawlikowski made in his years working for the BBC. Astoundingly, he had continued access to Radovan Karadzic, one of the generals that started the Serbian wars that helped tear apart the then-unified Yugoslavia. Despite occasional bursts of machine-gun fire that seem rather casual, or passing tanks, we see the lighter side of religious and ethnic warfare: Karadzic reciting poetry, drinking, trying to call his wife, or, amazingly, discussing with other leaders just what territory they're willing to cede when new maps are drawn up. The banality of evil, indeed.

The last film of my determinedly eclectic day is part of the Amos Gitai tribute: "Roses à Crédit" (2010), based on a postwar novel by Elsa Triolet, the companion of Louis Aragon, and featuring a mouthwatering cast including Lea Seydoux, Pierre Arditi, Arielle Dombasle, and Valerie Bruni Tedeschi. Seydoux plays a spoiled young woman who's eager to acquire all the delights of consumer culture -- a brand-new Parisienne flat complete with modern appliances and new furniture, bought on credit -- despite the modest means of her husband, who's a horticultural researcher, and her own ill-paid job in Dombasle's beauty salon. Seydoux's intense performance (as well as her lovely and unselfconsciously displayed, frequently-nude body) holds the film together for me. In the brilliant last shot, she marches heedlessly, recklessly into the future, of France as well as the cinema.

Mexican Noirs Screen in Morelia (Plus the Film 'Gone Girl' Should've Been)

Meredith Brody — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 19:53:36 GMT

It's hard to express the sharp sense of joy I felt when I first opened the program for the 12th Morelia International Film Festival. The late and much-lamented Peter von Bagh named a section of the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna "the cinephile's paradise," and though there's nothing anywhere in the world like Il Cinema Ritrovato, I am still excited by the cinephilic banquet that Daniela Michel and her programmers assemble in Morelia.

It's not just a survey of the films, both narrative and documentary, that are currently making the festival circuit, which would be appealing on its own. And it's not just the strong section of current Mexican movies, few of which travel outside of the Spanish-speaking world. There's also the festival's link with the Semaine de la Critique, or Critics' Week, in Cannes, which traditionally brings a number of its films to Morelia. But what seduces me and makes Morelia an essential stop on the festival circuit is its retrospective component. This year, FICM programmed a glorious seven-film survey of Mexican film noir; two very odd American films from the 1930s restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive; three '50s films by Spanish auteur Jose Antonio Nieves-Conde; a three-film series of Hollywood films set in Mexico called "Imaginary Mexico," curated by the Pacific Film Archive's Steve Seid; two films presented by the Criterion Collection, Alfonso Cuaron's "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and Olivier Assayas' "Summer Hours"; and retrospectives of the prolific Israeli director Amos Gitai and Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski. The Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia honors film in all its aspects.

First up, I caught "La otra" ("The Other One"), by Roberto Gavaldon, 1946, starring Dolores del Rio in the role of twin sisters, one rich and recently widowed, the other impoverished and working as a manicurist. Dolores del Rio is not exactly a supple actress. I imagine meal Meryl Streep would have made of the part, because the script mentions that the twins have two different-sounding voices, a distinction that escapes me in del Rio's performance. The main differences between the twins here are side-parted flowing hair for the rich girl and a center-parted severe hairstyle for the poor one (plus an important pair of wire-rimmed spectacles).

But del Rio is a clotheshorse par excellence, herself a black-and-white Art Deco artifact, perfectly at home in the lavish interiors of the rich twin's mansion, gleaming like a misplaced gem in the shabby rooms of the manicurist's tiny flat. There's a wonderful scene where she throws gorgeous designer outfits that she can't wear, condemned to a year of widows' weeds, at the feet of her poor sister: ball gowns, furs, chic suits. She snatches back one tricky striped dress; "No, I promised this one to my chambermaid."

Afterwards I see another oddity, a true film maudit, "Double Door," 1934, by Charles Vidor, enthusiastically introduced by Shannon Kelley of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which restored it. It's based on a very successful play, itself based on a famous scandal of the time wherein a large family was kept imprisoned in a mysterious Fifth Avenue mansion. The Paramount adaptation brought two of the play's stars, Mary Morris (as the elderly aunt, although she was only 39), and Anne Revere (later to be blacklisted) in her first film role as Morris' cowed and bullied sister, as well as the glowing young Evelyn Venable, Kent Taylor, and Sir Guy Standing.

"Double Door," behind which lurks a hidden locked and soundproof room, is fetchingly titled "La hiena de la Quinta Avenue" ("The Hyena of Fifth Avenue") in Spanish. It was a crowd-pleaser then, and it thrills the 2014 audience now. A key element of the plot concerns a matchless string of pearls, valued at $500,000 in 1930s dollars: I tell some friends that Cartier famously exchanged a string of pearls for the Fifth Avenue mansion it's still housed in, and later the Internet backs me up (it was a two-string necklace, and Pierre Cartier did the deal in 1917). And I also mention this current harbinger of a new Gilded Age: the International Center of Photography sold its Upper East Side branch, housed in a five-story mansion built in 1915, for $17.5 million to a Wall Streeter who turned it back into a private house.

The next movie is "La noche avanza," Roberto Gavaldon, 1952, in which Pedro Armendariz plays an extraordinarily successful but fatally arrogant jai alai player, who falls afoul of blackmailing gangsters and a trio of glamorous women who he mistreats. Several songs are worked into the plot, since one of his three mistresses is a nightclub singer.

I stick around for "Los pesces rojo," Jose Antonio Nieves-Conde, 1955, even though I'd already seen it last year in Morelia's amazing retrospective devoted to Arturo de Cordova. Ever since I'd been haunted by the memory of its classic film noir opening : a sequence of wild storm-tossed waves, and then a shot of a car pulling up in the rain in front of a hotel whose neon sign -- HOTEL SAVOY -- is blinking, on and off. I also adored its convoluted plot, which owes something to both Hitchcock and Bunuel, and one of its main locales, a seedy burlesque house in Madrid, whose chorus girls wear appropriately scuffed-and-shabby white satin heels.

I don't know when or where I'll ever get a chance to see "Red Fish" again, though Criterion has been toying with the idea of a Mexican noir box for some time, inspired by their many-year collaboration with FICM. Film critic Miriam Bale says "It's what 'Gone Girl' should have been."

Cronenberg, Iñárritu, Godard and More Stun Mexico's 2014 Morelia Film Fest

Meredith Brody — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 19:52:54 GMT

The advantage of taking the redeye from the US to Mexico City for the Morelia International Film Festival is that you don't waste an entire day traveling. The disadvantage of arriving mid-morning on the first full day of festival screenings is that a movie by one of your favorite directors is starting in just a very few minutes: David Cronenberg's "Maps to the Stars." It debuted in Cannes, six long months ago, isn't due to open in the United States until February, five long months hence. The impatient cinephile's flesh is weak.

You rush off to the screening, and grab two types of your own liquid courage -- coffee and Coke Zero -- to fight off the grogginess inevitable after snatching perhaps three hours of fitful plane sleep. In some ways I wish I was groggier. I read Bruce Wagner's fictions -- most of which I own, and some of which are even inscribed by the author -- with a mixture of amusement and horror. And though I admire most of "Maps to the Stars"' actors, especially the incredibly game Julianne Moore, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes for her portrayal of the aging movie star Havana, I also watch the movie with a mixture of amusement and horror. It's interesting that there are resonances with another movie about actors that I saw and loved in Toronto, Olivier Assayas' "Clouds of Sils Maria," which is also playing here: both feature aging actresses. The luminous Juliette Binoche is conflicted about playing the older part in a new revival of the play that made her a star in its ingenue role. The luminous Julianne Moore is trying to get the part in a remake of the movie that her actress mother starred in, decades earlier.

I later learn that Wagner wrote a novel called "Dead Stars," based on his original screenplay, after an earlier plan to make the film fell through. I wonder if my completion fetish means I will buy Wagner's book, even though I find its story, and the sensibility behind it, disturbing, not to say appalling. He's still making hay out of his brief career as a limo driver, when it seems he was exposed to the worst of Hollywood.

Afterwards I stumble towards the opening day lunch, held in the beautiful courtyard of a government building, the Ayuntamiento de Morelia, which also appears to date to the 18th century. En route, I run into Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai, who is being honored with a retrospective here, inevitably only a fraction of his 60 or so determinedly eclectic movies. We share a table with another Israeli director, Noaz Deshe whose film "White Shadow" has won a number of awards at festivals in Dubai, Munich, and San Francisco; Pierre Rissient, the famed French tastemaker and producer's rep whose biopic "Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema" by Todd McCarthy, is playing here; Denis DeLaRoca, festival advisor; and Daniela Michel, the General Director of the festival, who somehow manages to greet and introduce everyone in the vast room. I congratulate her on the coup of debuting the festival, the night before, with the bravura "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)," which I think is Alejandro González Iñárritu's best and most dazzling film. She's still glowing from the evening.

Gary Meyer, chief curator for the Telluride Film Festival, and I run towards an irresistible hour-long documentary about Maria Felix, that axiom of the cinema, gorgeous star of Mexico's Golden Age, entitled "Maria Felix, Maria bonita, Maria del Alma" ("Maria Felix, Lovely Maria, Maria of the Soul"), made by Canal 22, one of Mexico's public television stations, like America's PBS. It is irresistible, combining photographs and clips with an over-the-top narration casting the events of Felix's life as if they were the plot of one of her melodramatic movies.

It's playing opposite Jean-Luc Godard's "Goodbye to Language," which I have seen twice without really feeling I've seen it as it should be seen. Once in Paris in July, in a theater where it was shown in 2D despite being listed as 3D in Pariscope and on the Internet; and once in September as the last film I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was indeed in 3D, but a 3D so blurry and headache-inducing that there must have been something wrong with the projection. I enjoyed it only intermittently both times. (I'm one of those philistines that preferred his early funny work. If I say my favorite Godard is "Contempt," that'll probably tell you everything. I muse, briefly, about movies about movies and the shared DNA of "Contempt" and "Maps to the Stars." When I hear the word "culture," I reach for my Discover card.)

The rest of the day brings revivals and rediscoveries from the Golden Age in quick succession. Julio Bracho's "Another Dawn" (1943), shot by the genius Gabriel Figueroa, whose brilliant compositions and shafts of poetic light are obvious even in this fading print, has something of the propulsive feeling of Cornell Woolrich's "Deadline at Dawn," with the forceful Pedro Armendariz being hunted by corrupt government thugs who want to kill him as well as obtain damaging documents in his possession, while he rekindles a romance with a now-married college sweetheart.

Alejandro Galindo's "Four Against the World" (1950) is a poetic evocation of the time-honored there-is-no-honor-among-thieves plot, wherein four ill-assorted bad guys hide out in a shabby apartment where all lust after the eminently lust-after-able Leticia Palmer, quite the saucy dish. Things end badly for all concerned.

Victor Halperin's "Supernatural" (1943) is quite the oddity: a brisk (65 minute) Paramount picture made by the Halperin brothers, who'd gotten a studio deal on the strength of the surprise success of their independent feature, 1932's White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi. Carole Lombard and Randolph Scott seem to (sleep) walk through it, but the minor players, especially Allan Dinehart as the fake medium and Beryl Mercer as his drunk greedy landlady, make a meal of the scenery. The Halperin brothers soon returned to independent production.

What's the Secret to Mexican Cinema Today? The Morelia Film Festival Has the Answer

Boyd van Hoeij — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 14:54:04 GMT

The 11th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (or FICM, to use its Spanish acronym), came to a close last weekend in the picturesque town in Michoacan that gives the festival its name. Even though the festival is relatively young, it has managed in its decade of existence to build up a solid international reputation and has also created strong links to the local industry that it tries to promote. Indeed, it would not be amiss to suggest that as it enters its second decade, it has started maturing into adulthood.

The festival opened with the Mexican premiere of "Gravity," the box-office smash hit from former indie darling Alfonso Cuaron, who was in town to promote his film. His brother and "Y tu mama tambien" co-writer, Carlos Cuaron, was also in town to promote his own latest work, "Sugar Kisses" -- which, like “Gravity,” screened out of competition. A sweet children’s tale set in Mexico City's poorer neighborhoods, "Sugar Kisses" is about as different from "Gravity" as you can get, offering a snapshot of the interests and range of current Mexican cinema in a nutshell.

The presence of both films underlined the talent pool that's available locally and has the potential to work internationally. More specifically, it's a good indication of Morelia’s strong ties with local filmmakers and the nurturing function festivals can have on local talent, who won't forget where they came from even after they’ve hit the big time.

Morelia has an international outlook and growing reputation that's steadily overtaking that of the Guadalajara Film Festival in March, which also showcases Mexican talent (some films, including the eventual winner of both festivals this year, "Workers," screen at both). The international press, festival programmers and filmmakers in Morelia are first and foremost present to acquaint themselves or catch up with the new Mexican productions and mingle with the Mexican filmmakers, which can in turn only help increase their network and, potentially, their future productions.

While still a relatively young festival, its opening film and carefully curated competition suggests Morelia is becoming an increasingly important player in not only the national but also the wider international field. For the first time this year, the festival's main competition, until then dedicated to first and second Mexican films, opened up to other films as well, essentially because the festival wanted to keep following talents it had unearthed and showcased in earlier editions, such as "Duck Season" and "Lake Tahoe" director Fernando Eimbcke, who presented his third feature "Club Sandwich" in competition, and Michel and Victoria Franco's "Through the Eyes," another soberly observed mother-son story that's Michel's third feature (though it's the first time the director of "Daniel & Ana" and "After Lucia" co-directs a film with his documentary director sister).

Morelia got off the ground around the same time that a new group of filmmakers started making their first films some 10 years ago, and even in this year's competition, a lot of the films featured young people and focused on their growth and well-being -- something that seems typical of a cinema in which many of the directors are themselves very young ("film what you know" is a well-known motto for young filmmakers). It's a testament to the relationship between the festival and the directors that both felt the need to continue building after a first helping hand from both sides.

The 11th edition's jury, composed of Anglophone critics Todd McCarthy and Jonathan Romney (the latter a last-minute replacement for ace German cinematographer and occasional director Fred Kelemen, who fell ill just before the festival) as well as Portuguese actress and occasional director Maria de Medeiros ("Pulp Fiction") managed to give the top award to the best film in the Mexican competition: "Workers" by Mexican-Salvadorian director José Luis Valle Gonzalez.

The film, which had its word premiere at the Berlinale in February, tells two parallel stories of elderly, working-class people who used to be married and who both have to face the cruelty of their rich employers, which causes them to fly off the rails. Impeccably composed and acted, the slow-moving film is indeed an impressive calling card for Valle Gonzalez, making his first fiction feature after the documentary "The Pope’s Miracle"; he's a voice we'll hopefully hear a lot more from in the not-too-distant future.

The Best First Feature deservedly went to "La Jaula de oro," from Mexico-based Spanish filmmaker Diego Quemada-Diez. The film, which premiered in Cannes this year in the Un certain regard section, tells the story of four kids who try to get to the U.S. from Guatemala. Though story-wise it has a lot in common with indie smash hit "Sin nombre" from Cary Joji Fukunaga, "Jaula" nonetheless manages to impress with the careful direction of its non-professional child actors and with its emotional honesty, laid bare by the often dire circumstances in which the kids find themselves. They have to grow up real quick and realize that together they're probably stronger than on their own; the shifting allegiances between the group of four, of which finally only two will remain, feel authentic and lived-in.

The best actor kudos went to the two leads of "Gonzalez," Harold Torres and Carlos Bardem (Javier's older brother and an impressive character actor in his own right). The duo play, respectively, an unemployed and heavily indebted young man in Mexico City and a Brazilian televangelist in early middle age for whose church the title character starts to work as a call-center employee, though it quickly becomes clear that the church is less interested in the spiritual well-being of its flock than in making sure they keep donating their cash, a discovery that the penniless protagonist tries to use to his advantage.

Best actress went to Venezuelan powerhouse Adriana Paz in "The Empty Hours," one of this critic's favorite films in competition alongside "Workers" and "La Jaula de oro." Like Eimbcke's "Club Sandwich," which screened earlier at the New York Festival, "Empty Hours" is set almost entirely in an empty holiday resort, which acts as the unlikely stage of a tentative if initially unlikely friendship that slowly evolves into something more. Whereas "Sandwich" focuses on a teenage boy whose relationship with the young daughter of one of the few other visitors sets off all sorts of alarm bells for his mother, who's not ready to let her son go, "Hours" sees the 17-year-old janitor of a seaside motel used by people for their extramarital affairs fall into a friendship with a beautiful woman, played by Paz, who spends most of her time waiting at the motel for her lover to arrive for a quick session of lovemaking, though she's often stood up, which creates an interesting dynamic with the young janitor.

Both films expertly suggest how off-season holiday venues are rather sad places that inspire tedium but at the same time offer opportunities for encounters that would probably be impossible in the hustle and bustle of high season. Like the protagonists in "Jaula," the teenagers in both these films are perfectly cast, suggesting either the directors all lucked out or, more likely, the combination of a good casting director and very hard work from the director and his actors resulted in performances that feel lived-in and true. Certainly, the fact that the directors are novices or still young filmmakers will have made it easier for them to empathize with their young protagonists -- though, thankfully, in none of these films is there a sense that opportunities have been missed because the directors lacked the cinematic or technical experience to pull them off.

"Sandwich" focuses on a young mother's minutely observed reactions to her adolescent son’s efforts to tiptoe into adulthood, which invites comparison to the premise of David Pablos' "The Life After," in which a depressed mother of an 18-year-old son and his younger brother suddenly leaves her kids behind to go back to her late father's house in another town; it also bears a resemblance to "The Amazing Cat-Fish" from Claudia Sainte-Luce, in which a terminally ill mother of three daughters and a young son strikes up a friendship with a young adult woman who conveniently turns out to be an orphan without a family.

The subject of being young and part of a family are constantly juxtaposed and often crystallize into the idea that the young characters' infatuations can be construed not so much as the simple result of an adolescent’s hormonal rush but rather as a young adult’s first hesitant step to let go of his or her parent or parents and (even if it's theoretically or in an embryonic state) start a family of his or her own.

It's quite a delight to notice how many of the female mother (or substitute mother) roles are meaty, complex parts for the actresses that play them, from the maternal instincts of "Sandwich" that find it hard to let go to the monstrously unconditional mother love in "Eyes"; from the desire in "Cat Fish" of a mother to leave her entire brood in good care to the irrational desire of a mother to be close to her dead father in "The Life After," which means abandoning her own children in the process.

Even in "The Well," the second feature of "Leap Year" director Michael Rowe (Cannes Camera d’Or in 2010), the protagonist may be a little girl who feels lost in the new home of her newly divorced mother who has moved in with her boyfriend in another town but the mother's actions -- or rather the lack of them -- can be just as telling as those of the little girl. And even in stories that don’t directly seem to address motherhood, such as eventual winner "Workers," the director suggests the importance of the family unit in smaller details, such as the fact that two protagonists are divorcees who had a child together that died very young, a fact that probably led to their separation.

A more mainstream than arthouse inclusion in the competition, "Paradise" from Mariana Chenillo, also underlined the importance of family in its rather clichéd story of two fatties who are married and have to move from the countryside to the city for his work, a place where casual body fascism is much more prevalent, which sends the couple straight into the arms of a heavy-duty (no pun intended) diet, which tests their resilience in more ways than one. The film, an uneasy mix of melodrama and light comedy, was produced by the production company of popular actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, Canana, which was also a producer on "The Well," as well as Chilean Oscar submission "Gloria," which also screened at the festival and offered another plum female role for its protagonist.

In a further sign of the exponential growth of local filmmaking, the separate section for local films, the Michoacan competition, comprised a feature for the first time this year, as well as the customary shorts. "January," from Adrian Gonzalez Camargo, whose first short played in the first Michoacan competition, tells the story of a man who kills his wife when she walks in on him and his lover, and again a theme seems to be how the destruction of traditional family units can have far-reaching consequences.

Camargo's film is especially strong in its opening moments; the killing actually occurs only on the soundtrack, with the screen simply black, and the subsequent series of carefully composed shots only gradually reveal what has happened. This attention to mise-en-scene isn't sustained, unfortunately, and the acting also leaves something to be desired, though Camargo's film does suggest he's a name who'll go on to make something that might play in the main Mexican competition in the future.

Also in town was "Y tu mama tambien" star Diego Luna, a regular at the festival who dropped by to promote the itinerant documentary festival Ambulante that he co-founded with Gael Garcia Bernal and producer Pablo Cruz in 2005 and that will finally cross the border into "El Norte" in September 2014, when it will present some 15 films in the Los Angeles area.

Christine Davila, a programming associate of the Sundance Festival and independent curator, will head the program of free screenings at several venues, with filmmakers expected to attend in order to foster debate and start a dialog with the local communities, just like in its Mexican counterpart. Clearly, a lot of exciting things are happening right now in Mexico -- and it's only right they get to show and share it with the rest of the world.

Latin American Gems at Non-Biz Obsessed Morelia Fest

Howard Feinstein — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 06:33:38 GMT

"Change of plans. We’re going to Sam’s Place."

I heard this exchange between two of the festival programmers at the Morelia International Film Festival after dining in a restaurant full of upside-down statues of Saint Antonio (women pray to him for a husband), before driving to the opening party. It sounded so mysterious. Sam’s Place. A strip club? A roadhouse? A druggie hangout? It turned out to be a magnificent home owned by a wealthy philanthropist, surrounded by 25 inch-thick walls of the ubiquitous pink granite that defines the city center, where architecture from the 17th and 18th centuries is the norm. (Morelia, Mexico is an official UNESCO Heritage site.)

As our car approached, I saw several armed policemen guarding the block. Inside the massive front door were three more, just for opening and closing. We were maybe 40 guests, with somewhere between 15 to 20 guards protecting us, likely on account of one or two government dignitaries who were in our midst. I became nervous, having recently read about Morelia as a major drug center (factories of crystal meth hidden in the hills), and some unfortunate assassinations in the main square, site of one of the most beautiful cathedrals I’ve ever seen.

But my paranoia was unjustified. I have never felt so safe walking around a city’s streets at all hours. People were warm and helpful, and once I discovered that the state of Michoacan is the avocado-growing center of the country, I became even more enchanted. I’m easy - I can be bought with the guacamole, the best I’ve ever had.

There is a trite lesson here, something along the lines of not judging a book by its cover. My preconceptions of this, the eighth Morelia International Film Festival (October 16 - 24), were way off. Yes, there were some good sidebars, like Quentin Tarantino’s choices of decades-old Mexican vampire and horror films, movies about the Mexican Revolution (this is the centenary year), a section of silent cinema, a retrospective of Olivier Assayas, and smaller tributes to directors like Terry Gilliam, Nicolas Filibert, and Doris Dorrie. Doris Dorrie? Okay, they missed the mark on that one, in which they presented "The Hairdresser," a vulgar little comedy that had been underwhelming in Berlin.

For me, most of the highlights were not, well, the catalog’s highlights. Tucked away here and there were a few Latin American shorts, both fiction and documentary, that were pure genius. And in the main competition of Mexican feature films (only seven), the ones that were pretty much unsung were the discoveries for this guy.

This happens most often at festivals when the priorities are clearly uncommercial. In terms of the symbiotic relationship between art and commerce that both defines and haunts film, the scales here tip heavily toward the latter.

"This is a festival invented by cinephiles for cinephiles," explains Daniela Michel, director since its inception in 2003. “We are not all that interested in the business part.” Wow. What fest leader admits that these days? It’s a confession more than fabulous, and it rang true. "We want to show the diversity of the Mexican film world and the international film scene, but also we have to think of the local audience, which makes up 70% of our attendees, a total of about 50,000 this year. So we show experimental works from Spain but we know many of the Morelian families like Woody Allen."

The festival has a connection to the Ambulante Film Festival, essentially a selection of documentaries that tour all over Mexico, that's recently branched into the neighboring Central American countries of Guatemala and Honduras. Ambulante is a child of Canana, the film company owned by Pablo Cruz, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Diego Luna (who was here to deservedly receive the Jose Cuervo prize for career achievement; this is a great actor who directed an excellent documentary, "Chavez," and a fine fiction feature, "Abel").

On the tour, according to Ambulante director Ricardo Giraldo, are about 60 films, Mexican and foreign, and they are shown mostly without charge in towns and villages where residents would have no other way to see them. In 2006 Ambulante linked up with Morelia for a yearly presentation of a new documentary and a major press conference outlining plans for the coming year. You have to love these people. Among the new sections is one called “Dictator’s Cut,” which focuses on films about human rights. Nothing like dedication and a wicked sense of humor.

A scene from Sebastian Hiriart's "A Stone Throw Away." [Photo courtesy of the Morelia Film Festival]

One of the features that bypassed my expectations was "A Stone’s Throw Away," a film in competition, the first film directed by cinematographer Sebastian Hiriart, its storyline developed in conjunction with the great actor and theater director Gabino Rodriguez. Rodriguez stars as a shepherd named Jacinto who tends his flock in the San Luis Potosi region in the north of Mexico. One day, after a powerful dream about discovering treasure, he finds a key chain with an address in Oregon. Thinking it a divine sign of impending financial gain, he slips into the U.S.,where he is robbed and beaten by both fellow Latinos and young gringos, but nevertheless he follows through on his plan until he reaches a remote snowy mountain pass where the address is located.

He doesn’t speak English, and the residents tie him up, assuming he stole it from their missing son. Xenophobes like most of the Americans Jacinto encounters in this unique road movie, have him deported. Suddenly the calm life of a shepherd does not look so bad. Besides Rodriguez’s masterful performance, Hiriart’s cinematography — he shot everything himself — is outstanding. His feeling for both natural, urban, and small-town landscapes is unique, as if the steady eye of a divinity were observing the world.

Another revelation in the competition was the feature "Alicia, Go Yonder," shot mostly in the far south of Argentina by Mexican filmmaker Elisa Miller. It’s something of a diary film, about two characters, who come together only briefly, each on a geographical journey to help in mapping out their psychological and emotional turmoil. Miller and actress Sofia Espinosa worked closely together to track her character from Mexico City to Buenos Aires to Calafate and the glacier at Petite Morena, not far from Antarctica. She had Espinosa and actor Martin Piroyansky (the confused teen in "XXY") improvise, never shooting more than one take, but still rehearsing with them individually in advance. A bit of the Mike Leigh approach.

What Miller got in three weeks is Art with a capitol A: superb compositions with unusual facial angles, light streaming through windows and leaving bits of matter in the air, but always cinematic. This is a road movie, so movement is essential. At only 65 minutes, and represented by a French sales agent, Miller is doing what director Michel had been emphasizing: being a creative cinephile without much regard for the business end. She’s brave. By the way, she won the Palm d’Or for best short in Cannes in 2007 with "Watching It Rain," so she’s a recognized talent who has selected her own path.

The shorts: "Glorious Saturday," a fiction by the Colombian filmmaker Santiago Lopez Ortiga, seemed like a Post-‘em in the catalog, a footnote to the Peruvian feature "Undertow," in the strand of international features. Shot for $35,000 on the Colombian island of Orika in the Caribbean, Lopez Ortiga used teen nonprofessionals in this story set in the popular world of cockfighting. A teen boy’s animal, called Bruce Lee, means the world to him, even if he has to lie to his young girlfriend about what he is doing. An assistant director of commercials, this director knows how to make a movie, and he has also succeeded in giving rare screen time to a marginalized community of blacks.

In a section about indigenous peoples called First Nations Forum, Spanish-born Alba Mora Roca, who now lives in Berkeley, presented a 26-minute documentary (a Spanish/Mexican/American co-production) set in Colombian jungles only recently explored. She filmed the plight of the Nukak Maku, who were unknown to the outside world until 1988. With old TV and archival footage, she shows how they were then - naked and proud, before missionaries brought germs and clothing; before narcotics traffickers moved in on their territory; and before necessity motivated them to guard coca fields for paramilitary groups. The interviews with the old-timers are fascinating; this is not only well-made, it is an important record of one of the great mistakes in modern anthropology.

An Argentinian-born resident of Mexico City, Flavio Florencio, known in Mexico as the organizer of the African Film Festival, showed his 15-minute work, "And God Would Know," in the official shorts competition. A deceptively simple tale about a very old woman (played by a centenarian he met in a café) whose sons are too preoccupied working in the States to visit her, it is basically cut between men in a truck and the old woman struggling with a pay phone. The film has a textured placidity, possibly influenced by the years Florencio has spent in Africa.

The main winners of the Morelia International Film Festival:

Best Mexican Feature: "Marimbas From Hell," by Julio Hernandez Cordon

Special Mention: "Mother Earth," by Dylan Verrechia and Aidee Gonzalez

Best Mexican Fiction Short: "The Gold Mine," by Jacques Bonnavent

Best Animated Mexican Short: "Ponkina," by Beatriz Herrera

Best Mexican Documentary: "El Varal," by Marta Ferrer

Best Michoacan Film: "The Idea of My Mother," by Maider Oleaga

Audience Award: "Acorazado," by Alvaro Curiel