02 · 12 · 15

Screening of Cuatro contra el mundo at the 2015 Berlinale

Alejandro Galindo’s Cuatro contra el mundo (1950), which was part of the 12th FICM’s Mexican Noir program, screened today at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). The restored version of this classic title was shown in a special screening in collaboration with the Filmoteca de la UNAM, Fundación Televisa, the Cineteca Nacional and FICM.

Daniela Michel, General Director of FICM, was at the screening: “It went really well. It was a very emotional moment for me as the director of FICM, to see an audience of Berliners watching a Mexican film from the 1950s. One of the really interesting things about the Berlin Film Festival is that it has more than 500,000 spectators, so everyone in the city goes to the cinema. It was really lovely to see Berliners watching a classic Mexican film, by a director who’s not known in Germany ... It was also a pleasure to present the work of Gunther Gerszo, who has German ancestry, and who was not just the film’s art director but was also at this time discovering his skill as a scriptwriter.”

Film Noir is a genre of cinema that came to prominence in the United States in the ‘40s and ‘50s, inspired chiefly by the crime novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. In Mexico the style enjoyed its heyday during the administration of president Miguel Alemán Valdés and, like the US version, was characterized by dark, melodramatic films involving private detectives, femmes fatales, gangsters and lovers on the run. Cuatro contra el mundo, described by the Berlinale as the prototype of the Mexican Noir style, tells the story of a group of bandits who, after assaulting and killing the driver of a truck transporting money, hide from the police in the attic of one of their lovers. But slowly, the tension begins to affect the group, and they start to fall apart.

Daniela Michel also spoke to us about the film’s journey to Berlin: “We had the honor of receiving the director of the Forum section of the Berlinale [Christoph Terhechte] in Morelia, and he was at the screenings of the Mexican Noir program. He loved the film and he thought it was important that the Berlinale audience got to know these gems of Mexican cinema, especially something so little-known as Cuatro contra el mundo – there are other better known examples of classic Mexican cinema, but this was a real discovery for him, and for the public that saw the film today”.

The Berlinale will screen Cuatro contra el mundo once more, on Friday 13th of February. You can check their program: here.