FGCU Mexican Film Fest gets to critical topics

Source by Janusz Zawewski

Mexican film art has earned a high reputation among international experts, who praised directors from Luis Buñuel — best director at Cannes, 1951, for “Los Olvidados,” and recently placed on UNESCO’s historical significance list — to a recent array of his successors:

Alejandro González Iñarritu

Carlos Reygadas

Multiple Cannes winnerAmat Escalante

Alfonso Cuaron (US-made “Gravity, 2013, Oscar for Best Director)

Yet Mexican film festivals are relatively rare in the United States.

They usually fall into the category of Latino film festivals, widely held across the country (from Miami to New York and Chicago, to San Diego, to Seattle).

Therefore it is worth noting that FGCU’s Department of Languages and Literature launched last week a series of Mexican feature films that will be presented every Thursday for four weeks in a row. This is not the first time FGCU makes foreign films available to the wider audience, the immediate previous one being the French Film Festival in the spring this year.

The films scheduled are three to seven years old, no longer in movie theaters and cover a broad range of topics, from generational gap bridged by Manuel Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” (“El Estudiante,” 2009), to migration of males from Mexican villages (“Spiral,” 2009), to sexuality of a mentally disabled boy (“La Mitad del Mundo,” 2007), to affection of a middle-age man for a teenager (“Flor de Fango,” 2011). Tragic and comic at the same time, they bring up a recurring topic of youth, its troubles and upbringing, present in Mexican cinema since it was first noticed over 60 years ago in “Los Olvidados.”

I watched the first film in a series, “Amor en Fin,” and was nicely surprised by the uncommon way it portrayed the Mexican society and its culture, so different from ours. I strongly recommend attending selected shows, since it’s an opportunity to learn how our closest neighbor sees itself through the eyes of their filmmakers.

If you are really interested in Mexican film, you may reach out for one of many very informative books written on the subject, the two more recent being:

Mexican National Cinema, A. Noble, Taylor & Francis, 2005.

Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry, by Misha MacLaird, Macmillan, 2013.

Janusz Zalewski is professor of computer science and software engineering, College of Engineering, at FGCU. He occasionally writes film, theater and art reviews for the Daily News.