Locarno Hosts Milestone Mexican Popular Cinema Retrospective

variety.com:

Anna Marie de la Fuente The 76thLocarno Film Festival is hosting one of the largest international retrospectives of Mexican popular cinema in decades, encompassing 36 titles of varying genres, from dramas to film noir as well as comedies, musicals, horror and sports.

Putting together “Daily Spectacle – The Different Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema” took at least two years, according to writer and programmer Olaf Möller, who curated the selection alongside critic Roberto Turigliatto and in close collaboration with Filmoteca UNAM director Hugo Villa and other key experts.

The unprecedented showcase of Mexican films ranging from the 1940s to the 1960s spans some 30 years of extraordinary creativity, which inspired subsequent generations of Mexican filmmakers.

Locarno first hosted a retrospective of Mexican cinema in 1957 but this new showcase goes beyond the Golden Age to more popular titles, with the oldest being “En Tiempos de Don Porfirio” (1940) and the youngest among them “Olimpiada en México”(1969), “two films that in their own way are dealing with questions of dictatorship, of covering up dictatorships and of certain tensions between stories that get most told and reflections in the stories that do get told,” said Möller, who also wanted to include Miguel Delgado’s wildly popular “The Three Musketeers” but could not find a decent print.