New wave from Mexico
Alonso Ruizpalacios, Amat Escalante and Michel Franco are part of a new set of Mexican directors who are focused on working in their country
Atrio of Mexican directors known as the Three Amigos has made their mark on Hollywood, dominating the Academy Awards best picture contest in recent years with films that have little connection to their homeland. But a new generation of Mexican filmmakers is finding international success with films produced in their own country.
Alonso Ruizpalacios, Amat Escalante and Michel Franco are part of a new wave of Mexican directors 40 or younger who — unlike Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro G. Inarritu — have focused on working in their native country despite the financial difficulties and safety issues.
Del Toro won best director and best picture for his fantasy romance The Shape of Water. It was the fourth time in five years that a Mexican director took home the honour. He was preceded by Cuaron’s 2014 space thriller Gravity and Inarritu’s back-to-back wins for Birdman and The Revenant in 2015 and 2016.
All four projects featured major Hollywood stars, but not distinctly Mexican stories. The works of Ruizpalacios, Escalante and Franco are different, and have won awards at prestige-building film festivals abroad.
Ruizpalacios won the best screenplay award last month at the Berlin International Film Festival for Museo, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, about a 1985 theft at Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology.
“My main interest is to keep making films here in Mexico. Is something that interests me a lot,” Ruizpalacios said in a recent interview.
Mexico, he said, “is a fertile land and is far from being over-exploited.” Ruizpalacios’ ‘Museo
Ruizpalacios, who in 2014 won best movie and best first film for Gueros at Mexico’s equivalent of the Oscars, the Ariel Awards, noted that Mexico’s tax incentives have made it easier for his generation to make movies.
“Everything used to be a lot more concentrated in a handful people. They were the ones with the support and now is much more democratised,” Ruizpalacios said. “I believe that I, and all my generation, got this very clearly: We could not have made the movies we have made and the ones we want to make without those [tax] changes.”
Escalante, whose credits include Sangre has said not only that he is interested Amat Escalante.
in making more films in Mexico, but that he wants to work specifically in the central state of Guanajuato, host to the International Cervantino Festival of Arts but also known for its religious conservatism.
“There I live, there I know, there I feel safe filming,” he said in 2016. “It has everything: there’s the field, the city, very interesting people.”
His films have garnered attention at international festivals, including a Cannes Film Festival award for best director for his 2013 film Heli, which explored the impact of violence in Mexico, portrayed through a relationship between a policeman and a young girl.
Franco, who won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes last year, said that he plans to keep working in his native country. He won for Las Hijas de Abril (April’s Daughter), about a pregnant teen and the conflicts that arise with her estranged mother.
“I am convinced there is no place where I can make better films than Mexico,” Franco said in 2017. “I love my country very much. It also hurts a lot to see so many people not living to the fullest in Mexico for many reasons, because of all the conflicts we have, but that is also something that can be portrayed in cinema.”