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FICM 2015 and 2016: LOS REYES DEL PUEBLO QUE NO EXISTE, THE MAN WHO SAW TOO MUCH, BEAUTIES OF THE NIGHT, TEMPESTAD and others.

Rafael Aviña

In 2015, the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) celebrated its 13th anniversary with the same vivacity and with an arsenal of purposeful and provocative films. The FICM was committed to the rescue of a Mexican Gothic cinema, it paid tribute to Fernando Méndez from Michoacán and introduced the Impulso Morelia Award. Of the 12 documentary films in competition, the big winner was Los reyes del pueblo que no existe, by Betzabé García. The film won the Ojo for Mexican Feature-Length Documentary and the Award for Feature-Length Documentary Directed by a Woman. In Los reyes del pueblo que no existe, the filmmaker immerses herself in a region that seems to be taken from an apocalyptic tale: a sort of ghost town devastated by floods that seem to come from nowhere and that have led its residents to escape from that abandoned place, inhabited by a few beings who have learned to coexist with loneliness and with a climatic reality as fascinating as it is devastating.

Its protagonists, Pani and Paula, refuse to close their tortilleria [a tortilla store) and dedicate their free time to rescue the town from the ruins; Miro and his parents dream of leaving but cannot; Jaimito and Yoya, although feeling afraid, have everything they need. They introduce the viewer to the mined area of San Marcos, Sinaloa, to tell the story of where the restaurants, the businesses and stores, the school, and even a character changed from a legend to a strange and intriguing work used to be located.

Meanwhile, The Man Who Saw Too Much, by Trisha Ziff, which won the Ariel for Best Documentary Feature, received the Ambulante Special Award and the Guerrero de la Prensa Award. Her film focuses on the fragility of existence, based on the famous snapshots of Enrique Metinides. The Man Who Saw Too Much discusses this red note photographer’s obsession with death, his professionalism and acuity, his collecting mania for toy ambulances and toy fire trucks, the impact of his images, the thrill that suspends the horror halfway between fear and the morbidity of the people captured by his camera, something inherent to the Mexican himself; as well as the international exhibitions of which “El Niño” has been the subject and the story of his multiple accidents, all from the retirement home where he lives with his family and daughters. And El Paso, by Everardo González, a harsh denunciation of the fragility of the reporter’s profession in times of organized crime, also won the Ambulante Special Award.

The FICM reached its fourteenth edition, once again betting on historical vindications such as the Julio Bracho cycle and the retrospective of German filmmaker and actor Reinhold Schünzel, creator of the original Victor and Victoria (1933), repudiated by the Nazi regime and by his German colleagues who were sheltered in Hollywood. In the documentary field, Tempestad, by Tatiana Huezo, won a Special Mention and the Audience Award for Mexican Feature-Length Documentary for two cases: a young woman held in a prison controlled by organized crime and a woman searching for her missing daughter. An X-ray of a deep and, at the same time, daily Mexico where violence and chaos rule. The film navigates in an almost surrealistic space through which the common individual walks, a potential victim in a country that survives within the confusion that overtakes us all.

Tempestad proposes a sort of two micro-fictions, not exempt from a certain dramatic mise-en-scene: Miriam Carbajal, a young ex-employee of the Cancun airport, is arrested without any fault along with other people and locked up in a prison in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, which is controlled by delinquency, where she will face the hell of imprisonment and the constant threat that can only be solved with large sums of money.  At the same time, the case of Adela Alvarado, clown by profession in a small circus, who will suffer the ordeal of uncertainty after the disappearance of her daughter Monica; a hopeless search in which she has been prey to extortion and incompetence of the authorities in total complicity with the crime.

Meanwhile, Beauties of the Night, by María José Cuevas, won the Ojo for Mexican Feature-Length Documentary, the Award for Feature-Length Documentary Directed by a Woman and the Guerrero de la Prensa Award. Inspired by the title of that mythical film that opened the doors to a new subgenre of sex comedies, albures¹ and nudity: Bellas de noche [Beauties of the night] (1975, dir. Miguel M. Delgado), the filmmaker has produced one of the most celebrated, entertaining and daring documentaries of recent times. Written by herself and edited by her half-sister and filmmaker Ximena Cuevas, the film focuses on some of the Goddesses of the night show business in Mexico in the seventies and eighties, in a sensitive and amusing portrait. A nostalgic snapshot of the era of vedettes and nightclubs, as well as the paths taken by figures such as Olga Breeskin, Lin May, Rossy Mendoza, Wanda Seux and Princesa Yamal.

Finally, Resurrección, by Eugenio Polgovsky, won the Ambulante Special Award. It is set in the legendary waterfall of El Salto de Juanacatlán, in Jalisco, once known as “Mexico’s Niagara” whose waters became toxic with the creation of an industrial corridor in the 1970s. Here Polgovsky mixes a daily vision and social conscience: the choral portrait of a forgotten town and, at the same time, the cynicism, corruption and indolence of governments and authorities, in a sad and moving documentary story.

Translated by Adrik Díaz

Translator's Note

1: TN: An albur is phrase with a double meaning that is used in conversations to make fun of someone, usually referring to something that is considered a sexual humiliation.