Paz Alicia Garciadiego and Arturo Ripstein at the 2000 Festival. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

“Cinema teaches us everything. God teaches us through the cinema.” Paz Alicia Garciadiego, El evangelio de las maravillas (Divine)

Since its inception, the San Diego Latino Film Festival has grown and transformed from being a venue to celebrate and screen works exclusively by students to its current high profile of mainstream to alternative works from throughout the Americas which San Diego cinephiles would otherwise probably never view in their hometown. This year’s festival inaugurates the dawn of the new millennium with a vibrant cross section of feature length films from Mexico.

The seven Mexican features selected for this year’s festival represent diverse trends in contemporary filmmaking and highlight the works of consecrated masters of Latin America’s leading national cinema. These include Arturo Ripstein, spotlighted with two of his most recent films, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (Nobody Writes to the Colonel, 1999) and El evangelio de las maravillas (Divine, 1998); new cutting edge directors, namely Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California: el límite del tiempo (Under California: The Limit of Time, 1998); as well as mainstream audience favorites, Antonio Serrano’s Sexo, pudor y lágrimas (Sex, Shame, and Tears, 1998). The films span multiple genres including comedy, tragedy, crime-dramas, and historical melodramas. They also feature internationally renowned actress and actors including Marisa Paredes, Carmen Maura, Salma Hayek, Francisco Rabal, Hector Alterio, as well as popular Mexican actors such as Miguel Angel Rodríguez and Rafael Inclán.

Perhaps the major coup at this year’s festival is to have secured a screening of Arturo Ripstein’s “El coronel no tiene quien le escriba,” having just played at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. El Coronel is Ripstein’s 23rd feature length film since he began directing at the prodigious age of twenty-one. In El coronel Ripstein returns full circle to his own moment of directorial origin: his Western-set feature Tiempo de morir (Time to Die, 1965) which also featured a script by the now Nobel prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez. While Tiempo de morir focused on out-dated models of honor-bound masculinity and intolerance, El coronel is a love story about an older couple set in a sleepy town in Veracruz.

The San Diego Latino Film Festival seized the occasion to celebrate and honor Ripstein, Mexico’s leading contemporary director, hands down. Ripstein’s significant body of work stands equal to the most respected work of world cinema’s master directors. A controversial figure to contend with, Ripstein is a gargantuan cultural institution. Meticulously precise and detailed in his every endeavor, his vision of the degraded and the marginal, of visionary zealots, doomed lovers, fierce male transvestites, hyper-virile machos, iron-clad mother and father figures, tormented and destructive families, sinful loners on the edge have all helped forge a unique style. His films are simultaneously iconoclastic of revered national symbols while simultaneously reveling in neo-nationalist aesthetics. While stylistically Ripstein’s dark melodramas at times appear to be cold and detached, at the core they house fragile, complex, and fiercely intelligent idealists who are clearly loved and admired by their creator.

Ripstein is perhaps the only Mexican art cinema director to have such an impressive continuity in terms of his creative output in a film industry characterized by disruption every six years with the change of each presidential administration. His El evangelio de las maravillas (Divine, 1998), also screening at this year’s festival, is a three-pronged homage: to the cinema, to his mentor Luis Buñuel, and to Ripstein’s own oeuvre.

For those who have followed his career, El evangelio, a black comedy about a millennium religious cult waiting for the end of the world, is a wickedly funny film full of references to, amongst others, Ripstein’s own films. These citations range from the claustrophobic incarceration of an alternative family in his international breakthrough film El castillo de la pureza (The Castle of Purity, 1972); to the religious fanaticism of his elegant representation of Mexican Jewish conversos and the consequences of religious persecution in El santo oficio (The Holy Office, 1973); to the tensions between heterosexual machismo and homophobia in his cult classic “El lugar sin límites” (Hell Has No Limits, 1977); to the in-joke of using the same bath robe several of his characters have worn dating to at least his anti-folkloric remake of novelist Juan Rulfo’s El gallo de oro retitled El imperio de la fortuna (Realm of Fortune, 1986) and written by his brilliant screenwriter and partner Paz Alicia Garciadiego with whom Ripstein’s work has matured to levels of universal treasure.

		Jorge Bolado at the 2000 Festival. Photo by Nic Paget-Clarke.

Gabriel Retes’ Un dulce olor a muerte (A Sweet Smell of Death, 1998) is a riveting drama set in a small rural Mexican town which investigates the murder of a young woman whose naked corpse is found in the fields. The murder investigation proves to be a ploy to interrogate a vicious cycle of honor-bound masculinity and the scapegoating of ethnic outsiders. Retes is best known for stubbornly filming since the mid 1970s on the fringes of the film industry. Un dulce olor, however, departs slightly from his cine casero (home movie) aesthetic, emphasizing a glossy MTV style full of quick cuts, arresting montage sequences, and striking angles. Like his two previous films (El bulto / The Lump, 1992) and Bienvenido-Welcome (1994), the riveting Un dulce olor includes an impressive number of performances from his illustrious cast.

Antonio Serrano’s successful stage to screen adaptation and direction of his sleek, heterosexual romantic comedy Sexo, pudor, y lágrimas has proven to be the biggest box-office success in Mexican film history, having grossed over twelve million dollars in Mexico alone. Riding on the heels of another successful romantic comedy, Cilantro y perejil (Recipes to Stay Together, Rafael Montero, 1996), Serrano’s film features a young and attractive ensemble cast and a fast paced narrative that has tapped into the hearts of a good number of its audiences.

El cometa (The Comet, 1998) is the second directorial feature by the husband-wife team Marisa Sistach and José Buil after their first collaboration on the experimental autobiographical documentary La linea paterna (The Paternal Lineage, 1994). El cometa is situated at the brink of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, focusing on a handful of performers in a traveling carpa (popular theater). Like Sistach’s and Buil’s previous collaboration, their new work again takes up how the emergence of cinema transforms the daily lives of its central characters.

The fledging auteur Carlos Carrera’s fourth feature, Un embrujo (Under a Spell, 1997), like El cometa, is a historical melodrama set in 1930s Yucatan and focuses on the taboo subject of a sensual older teacher played by Blanca Guerra who has sexual relations with her adolescent pupil. This doomed romance is exquisitely shot by Rodrigo Prieto whose lush cinematography alone is worth checking out even if this film isn’t quite as well-rounded as Carrera’s previous features, most notably La mujer de Benjamín (Benjamin’s Woman, 1991) and Sin remitente (No Return Address, 1994). An ambitious and rich film, Un embrujo swept nine Arieles, including best director, actress, and cinematography.

The vastly different critical and commercial success of the Mexican films screening at this year’s San Diego Latino Film Festival attest to the conundrum that Mexican films have been poised at with every sexenial crises since the 1970s: a near bankrupt industry struggling to achieve international box-office success with sleek, ultra-modern works and small films aimed at select audiences which engage Mexico’s richly varied cinematic traditions. Notwithstanding the criticism which the beleaguered state-funded Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (Mexican Film Institute, IMCINE) all too often seems to be the brunt of, IMCINE, responsible for partially funding all the Mexican features screening at this year’s festival, should be commended for continuing to foster a lively national film culture in the face of Hollywood’s relentless competition.

Sergio de la Mora teaches film, literature, and popular culture in the Chicana/o Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. He was co-director of Cine Acción’s Festival ¡Cine Latino! in San Francisco and Berkeley.
Editor’s note: Segundo Siglo, (dir. Jorge Bolado, Mexico, 1999), was added to SDLFF 2000 schedule after the preceding essay was commissioned.