Alejandro González Iñárritu in conversation with Tom Shoval

From December 4-6, 2015, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative offered up a weekend dedicated to the arts at the Centro Cultural del Bosque in Mexico City, bringing in the year’s end with a celebration of their mentoring program. The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative matches young talents with established artists for a year of one-on-one mentorship.

The Mexico City event brought together more than 150 leaders from the international art world, including this year’s cinema mentor, the extraordinary Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who participated in an on-stage conversation with his ‘protégé’ Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval. The conversation was moderated by FICM General Director Daniela Michel.

Daniela Michel, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Tom Shoval at the Julio Castillo Theater. Image from The Hollywood Reporter.

Tom Shoval won the Best Film Prize at the 2013 Jerusalem Film Festival for his feature film debut Youth, and thanks to the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, had the opportunity to be mentored over the course of a year by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who invited the young filmmaker to take part in the filming of his most recent film The Revenant (2015). On the initiative’s official website, the young Israeli director expressed his gratitude for Iñárritu’s tremendous generosity, and stated that the access he was granted to The Revenant’s creative process - from pre-production to final editing - was the best film education possible.

In the on-stage conversation, which was attended by almost 1000 people, González Iñárritu stated that he doesn’t consider himself a “master of cinema”. According to El Universal, the director has said: “To say that I am a master is like saying that I’m a sailor who has dominated the sea, and it’s not like that at all, the sea can’t be dominated”. Shoval’s experience, however, was enormously rewarding.The Hollywood Reporter quotes the young director as saying: “Israel is not Hollywood. It is a small film industry where it’s still hard to raise money. You need a certain amount of trying to convince the producers that the film can be commercial, but sometimes it conflicts with your motivation to try and discover something new and to show other angles of humanity,” Shoval explained. “One of the thing that the mentorship has offered is for me to see Alejandro dealing with all those aspects and challenges. It gave me inspiration to try not to lose my motivations and my ideas.”

From its beginnings in 2002, the Rolex mentoring program has developed to become an enriching dialogue between artists from different generations, cultures and disciplines, helping transmit our artistic heritage to the next generation. To learn more about the initiative, and about the collaboration between González Iñarrito and Shoval, click here: www.rolexmentorprotege.com/pairing/2014-2015/alejandro_irritu_and_tom_shoval