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That’s clearly my problem, not the movies’. The current wave of Mexican art cinema displays great creativity in its consideration of painful subject matter—their formal ingenuity seems to proclaim, “No tragedy can subdue the power of art.” Constant in these films is a palpable sense of the director’s exhilaration. You can feel it in the extended Steadicam shots of Heli, the emphatically big-screen compositions of Workers, or in the way Quemada-Diez seems to discover his characters in the mannerisms of his nonprofessional actors. La Jaula de Oro is also a remarkable experiment in cinematic realism: speaking at the screening I attended, Quemada-Diez explained that he began his screenplay after interviewing roughly 600 people who’d attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexican border illegally. Every scene in the movie is drawn from firsthand testimony. The film combines many different stories, but it never feels like a collage. I hope someone manages to bring it back to Chicago, ideally as part of a new-Mexican-cinema series.
Below are my top ten favorites from this year’s festival. This shouldn’t be taken as comprehensive. I saw 26 titles at CIFF, but caught almost none of the prizewinners and few of the big studio movies that will open in wide release in the coming months.
- Tanta Agua
