In 2023, Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature — the Mexican-born filmmaker’s third Academy Award since first winning in 2018 for “The Shape of Water.” As del Toro held this statue once more, a reporter asked him what the award would say if it had Pinocchio’s speech ability. The director answered in Spanish, “It would tell me he’s Indio Fernández.”
His quip references the long-rumored connection between the statuette and Mexican director/actor Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, who allegedly modeled for the Oscar statue’s design during his stay in the United States — just before becoming one of the most notable filmmakers of Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema. Del Toro holding this piece of cinematic history is alluringly symbolic, especially given the filmmaker’s prolific Hollywood status 30-plus years after his debut “Cronos.” It wasn’t until Alfonso Cuarón’s 2014 Best Director win for “Gravity” that a Mexican-born filmmaker held Fernández’s alleged likeness, and only three Mexican-born directors have received Oscar nominations in the top filmmaking categories (none predating the year 2000): del Toro, Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, colloquially known as The Three Amigos. All have also won Oscars.
Carlos A. Gutiérrez, executive director of Cinema Tropical, recognized these uphill battles when he co-founded the organization to aid in the production, programming, and promotion of Latin American films. “There’s a more invisible, impossible border in what type of narratives certain countries are allowed to tell,” he told IndieWire. “European and American counterparts don’t understand the richness of Mexican cinema because the parameters are very narrow. They have to be tied to what looks like Italian Neorealism or what looks like French New Wave. All these tropes of world cinema are very limited.”
Awareness of this disparity (among other things) plagued the awards campaign for Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language, French-made “Emilia Pérez,” all the way to its final shining moment at Sunday’s Academy Awards, where Zoe Saldaña won Best Supporting Actress. On stage, Saldaña celebrated winning for a role where she sang and spoke in Spanish, representing as the first actress of Dominican descent to win the award. But as she spoke to reporters, holding that golden tribute to Fernández, she countered a Mexican reporter’s criticism of the film’s lacking relationship to the country, responding, “The heart of this movie was not Mexico.”
However Saldaña might feel about Mexico’s relationship to “Emilia Pérez,” it is nonetheless true that the movie’s narrative hangs on the brutal impacts of the country’s cartel violence, invoking the country’s sociopolitical landscape. Meanwhile, “Sujo,” Mexico’s submission for Best International Feature, approached the same subject, holding Mexico in its heart while investigating violence, identity, and how characters navigate a culture of machismo and live up to the promise of their names. Despite making the Oscars shortlist, “Sujo” — distributed in the U.S. by The Forge, a newer outfit — had a very limited release in the States and was added to VOD at the end of February.
Rather than pitting these films against each other, there’s a broader, trickier issue that mirrors the questions at the center of both movies: Whose legacies persist? Who is telling the story? How is that narrative controlled?
Margaret Bodde, executive director of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation (TFF), recalled the late Peter Bogdanovich’s words when advising on selections for the education program: “It’s just the films that will still play.” Bodde told IndieWire that approach is true to TFF’s philosophy — particularly of its World Cinema Project — agreeing, “There are still films that you watch from the ‘20s that feel fresh and new.”
The World Cinema Project has restored and made available 65 films from 31 countries. Eight of these restorations hail from Mexico, ranging from the early 1930s through 1960. Bodde noted that access to film negatives can be affected by “logistical and bureaucratic issues” — the film negatives for TFF’s Cuban restorations, for example, had to be hand-carried due to challenges with customs — and “issues with climate and storage, not just true of Latin American countries, but countries that are equatorial and that don’t historically have funding or archival resources.”
“Things move slowly in general with preservation, no matter what the project is,” she added, but their Mexican titles have had the fortunate support of partners like Filmoteca de la UNAM and The Material World Foundation. Some projects are possible through collaborations with descendants of historic filmmakers, like 1934’s “The Phantom of the Monastery,” whose negative was provided by Viviana García Besné of the Permanencia Voluntaria archive.
García Besné’s 2009 documentary “Perdida” uncovers her family’s significance in Mexico’s film industry. Her great-grandfather José U. Calderón and his brother Rafael began a family cinema enterprise during the Mexican Revolution. As Americans started to flee, families like the Calderóns could afford to purchase the businesses left behind.
They bought the silent theater Cine Alcázar in Chihuahua, eventually expanding into the Alcázar circuit of 36 theaters (including six in El Paso, Texas). Their cinema careers expanded to distribution when sound introduced the demand for Spanish-spoken films. They produced 1932’s “Santa,” Mexico’s first film with synchronized dialogue, and the first Mexican horror film with sound, 1933’s “La Llorona.” The Calderón family’s influence grew as Mexico’s Golden Age took off in the 1940s, but their legacy soured in later decades as the family produced less respected “popular” films following the Golden Age.
“Scholarship doesn’t really care or write about some of this stuff,” said Raul Benitez, a Chicago-based programmer who has worked to screen García Besné’s archive for American audiences. Among the family’s later movies featuring luchadoras and various movies starring wrestler-actor El Santo, they are credited for creating fincheras — racy comedies.
One of the more prestigious titles Permanencia Voluntaria restored is 1951’s “Victims of Sin,” which entered the Criterion Collection last year. The movie is one of several collaborations between Emilio Fernández and legendary Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. It is the only film from the Calderón archive to enter the collection and perhaps more surprisingly, the only entry from either Fernández or the Mexican Golden Age. “Victims of Sin” is a rumberas film, a risque but more respected genre than the fincheras, which merged the tenets of film noir with Afro-Caribbean music and dance to reflect the nightlife of Mexico’s growing cities.
García Besné is largely responsible for reviving her family’s influence in Mexican cinema and advocating for greater preservation and access to movies from the popular era. “The work that Viviana has done is super important,” said Abraham Castillo Flores, who has contributed special features to physical media releases of Permanencia Voluntaria’s “La Llorona” and “Phantom of the Monastery” under Powerhouse Films’ Indicator label. Castillo Flores himself is a strong advocate for Mexico’s lesser-known titles. His friendship with Powerhouse’s producer Nora Mehenni led to further involvement with Indicator’s Mexican releases, including close collaboration on the label’s “El Vampiro” box set released last year.
Mehenni met Castillo Flores at the Fantasia Film Festival while she was previously working at Arrow Video. “I always loved Mexican cinema, and I always thought there was not enough available,” she said. Through their shared passion, they collaboratively pitched Mexican releases to Arrow — but their excitement wasn’t matched (Arrow’s 2024 limited edition release of Robert Rodriguez’s “Mexico Trilogy” is the label’s sole representation of Latin America across physical releases and the streaming platform). “La Llorona” and “Phantom of the Monastery” were already on the schedule when Mehenni joined Powerhouse, but her enthusiasm and knowledge led to her taking over future Mexican titles, working to ensure these releases don’t perpetuate “understanding Mexican movies through a Western filter.”
Castillo Flores recalls the UK-based label heavily featuring English and American contributors at the time of Indicator’s first two Mexican releases. He told Indicator, “There are experts here in Mexico that know things that no one in England and the States probably knows. If we give the microphone to them, we’re going to get stories that are not only important for people to know, but that have not been heard in the English-speaking world.”
Within two years of Mehenni joining Indicator, the catalog boasts 14 Mexican titles, all released with updated subtitles and bonus features that platform a diverse array of experts contextualizing each film within the country’s cinematic history.
One of the newest additions to Mehenni’s roster is Armando Hernandez, who writes, programs, and podcasts under the banner Trash-Mex. Hernandez initiated a self-guided education of Mexican cinema from the 1970s to early 2000s, starting with movies he remembered seeing on TV as a kid. “You go into the ’90s, and it’s like, ‘Why were there such low-budget movies coming out by then? Why were these famous actors from the Golden Age coming out in these straight-to-video movies?’” he said.
By the 1960s, Mexican movie theaters were under government control in an attempt to prevent monopolies. Leaner production budgets led to the degrading quality of films and an increased focus on quantity. Simultaneously, American demand for Mexican-produced films diminished as Spanish-language movie theaters closed down or changed ownership. Mexico began producing its own form of exploitation films, including an uptick in movies reflecting concerns about drug trafficking and violence. Hernandez began blogging about these genre films. He eventually caught the attention of local film programmer Michael Aguirre, who approached him about programming a Mexican film at Santa Ana’s Frida Cinema. In 2022, they screened Rubén Galindo Jr.’s “Grave Robbers” (1989) and have continued to program grittier genre titles to great success at the Frida and beyond.
Valeria Villegas Lindvall, a doctor and researcher of film studies, was fascinated by the Mexican films “that we usually consider to be low-grade and tacky,” and their interplay with the real-life horrors present in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Villegas Lindvall’s film research returns to that undercurrent of colonialism, but she said that outsider perspectives often see the horror, not the context. “Horror scholars in Latin America are going into demystifying this kind of global northern knowledge of, ‘Let’s tell brown people how bad they’re doing,’” she said. “It’s hard sometimes to see this retro attitude coming on — especially in commercial circuits — because it speaks to a disposition of the ‘60s and ‘70s where a lot of critics expected these visions of misery.”
That expectation, unfortunately, continues today as films with familiar narco- and poverty-laden tropes (produced in and outside of Mexico) receive more critical and programmatic recognition. “There has been made a fantasy of organized crime as if it were a life of success and luxury. We wanted to deconstruct that idea,” said Fernanda Valadez, who co-wrote and co-directed “Sujo” with Astrid Rondero. “[We] became adults when the crisis began 20 years ago. We’ve had time to process that horror and ask with ‘Sujo’ what comes afterwards.”
Even in Mexico, individuals like photographer and teacher Andrea Morales had limited access to “Sujo” in theaters. Morales grew up in Hermosillo, the capital city of the otherwise agricultural state of Sonora. She now lives in Tijuana, where she says “Sujo” only played for one to two weeks at a single theater, with showtimes that were either very late in the evening or when people are usually at work. Despite the limitations, Morales made it to a Tuesday, 10:00 p.m. showtime with a small audience.
“It was incredible,” she said, adding that the movie handled the sensitive narco themes well. Morales recommended the film to her friends back in Hermosillo, but the movie wasn’t playing at a theater near them. She notes that the movies that dominate Mexico’s screens tend to come from outside the country.
Transcendent of what scholarship, distribution, and programming may say, the heart of cinema isn’t inherently absent of Mexico’s film history. In 1946, Emilio Fernández helped John Ford shoot “The Fugitive,” with Gabriel Figueroa as cinematographer. Ford spoke highly of the work. “It had a lot of damn good photography — with those black and white shadows,” he said. “We had a good cameraman […] and we’d wait for the light — instead of the way it is nowadays, where regardless of the light, you shoot.”
Ten years later, John Ford would end “The Searchers” with that famous shot of Ethan Edwards: turning back toward the West, his shadow lingering in the doorway before disappearing into the harsh landscape. The ending is a perfect inverse to how Figueroa shoots the end of “Victims of Sin.” Our heroine Violeta emerges from the parting prison gates, reunited with her adopted son, stepping toward the opportunity of freedom. As “Victims of Sin” recontextualizes the cabaret dancer as a moral figure of agency and determination, “The Searchers” dismantles the myth of the American Western hero in a way that would influence so many later Westerns.
In “Perdida,” Viviana García Besné narrates her family’s home videos — representing a once mysterious history to her — wondering how “these images had survived for more than 80 years.” To limit our cinematic curiosity would be to lose the very history, expertise, and innovations that have defined cinema since its inception. If we can learn anything from the past, it’s that not once has the history of film ever operated in static isolation. Per Margaret Bodde, there’s a simple but effective philosophy that can open up a world of exploration: “Any film that you haven’t seen is a new film.”
