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Festival premieres El baile de San Juan

Clara Sánchez Translated by Morris Thompson

The big-budget movie filmed in Mexico, France and Spain  is set in the last decade of the 18th Century in New Spain. On the red carpet at the event were Athié, Tavira, Ciangherotti and Ana Claudia Talancón.

During the question-and-answer session afterwards, Athié said that the main aim of the film was to have done enough research to give the viewer the sense of watching a documentary set in the period. Among the historians who helped with that research was Rafael Tovar y de Teresa.

El baile de San Juan takes place in a city inhabited by mestizos, Spaniards born in New Spain and foreigners entwined in falling in and out of love, court intrigues and popular demands, viceregal dogmatism and libertarian dreams, native traditions and Roman Catholic rules.

Athié received much praise for the film, whose cast also includes Pedro Armendáriz, Jr., who is president of the Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas (AMACC) – the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Tavira was asked about his character, Giovanni, who must struggle to accept his mixed-race heritage. "This is a very difficult revelation for my character, for one, because he distrusts indigenous people so much, and for another, because he has to re-evaluate his entire life," Tavira said.

Asked about the difficulties of filming in three different countries, Athié said, "We took advantage of it to seek budgetary support in each of the countries, and because it was very hard to get the funds in cash, we tried to invest it completely in filming the scenes in that country. That's a piece of advice that I want to share with people who want to make international movies."

El baile de San Juan is a voyage to colonial Mexico that displays its grandeurs and its faults. But no doubt the film's most significant aspect is how it highlights the characteristic racial mixing of the time, not just between the ancient residents of Mexican lands and the Spanish, but also with black slaves who were brought here.

"A lot of people forget that there were black people in Mexico,"  Athié said. "One interesting fact for me learning that many daughters of the upper classes who were reared by black nannies spoke with them in their native languages as a way to keep secrets, such as to keep from being found out when they went to see their boyfriends."

Although the film has yet to be released in Mexico, it's grouped with movies made with the theme of Bicentennial of Independence and Centennial of the Revolution.