10 · 09 · 13

Robert Rodriguez will be a special guest at the 11th FICM

We are excited to announce that renowned filmmaker Robert Rodriguez will be a special guest at the 11th FICM where he will present his most recent film Machete Kills.

“We are very happy that Robert Rodriguez has chosen us as the first festival he will attend in Mexico as an invited guest,” said Daniela Michel, general director of FICM. “We are very pleased and honored he will be here.” Actor Danny Trejo will also be at the festival for the second time to present Machete Kills, along with Rodriguez.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1968, to Mexican-American parents, Roberto Rodriguez started at an early age to create cartoons and shoot films on video. He studied at the School of Communication at the University of Texas. His debut film, El Mariachi (1992), was made with a modest budget of 7,000 dollars, using only 25 rolls of film, and with Rodriguez working as director, producer, cinematographer, editor, sound editor, cameraman and coordinator of special effects. The film was originally directed at a Spanish-speaking audience and to the video market, but it eventually won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993. It is still regarded as one of the cornerstones of independent cinema.

Rodriguez’ first success in Hollywood came in 2001 with Spy Kids, a children’s film. After completing the Mariachi Trilogy with Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), he co-directed the stark hyperviolent and critically acclaimed Sin City (2005), an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller. The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year.

Machete (2010), an ironic post-modern mockery of a horrifying vision of Mexico, had as its main actor the inimitable Danny Trejo. It has been said that Rodriguez’ idea was to transform Trejo into a kind of “Mexican Charles Bronson or Jean-Claude Van Damme,” an action star, a vigilante who could return to the screen time and again to spearhead his unique style of doing justice. In the sequel, Machete Kills (2013), the U.S. government recruits Machete to kill a drug trafficker in Mexico who tries to send a gun into space and start a world war.

Irreverent, self-reflective, sometimes breathtakingly explicit and always entertaining, Rodriguez’ work is unique. We are very proud to welcome this great master of U.S. cinema to the festival.

Machete Kills, distributed in Mexico by Gussi Cinema, has a lineup of award-winning actors – Antonio Banderas, Demián Bichir, Cuba Gooding Jr., Sofía Vergara, Vanessa Hudgens and Amber Heard, among others.