Mexico Pushes Diversity
variety.comJohn Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Eight of the 10 directors in the Morelia Festival’s main Mexican competition are women, led by two of the biggest Mexican fest hits of the year,“Robe of Gems,” Natalia López Gallardo’s Berlin Special Jury laureate, and “Huesera,” from Michelle Garza Cervera, a double Tribeca winner.
Features with Indigenous or Black Mexican protagonists have shot up in Mexico, from 14 in 2019 to 31 in 2019, according to Imcine’s Mexican Cinema Yearbook.
In 2017, Mexico’s biggest homegrown hit was Nicolas López’s “Do It Like an Hombre,” a merciless taunt of a Mexican macho’s helpless homophobia, which grossed $11.0 million in the country.
For centuries an entrenched bastion of machismo, in film terms, the dial is finally moving on diversity. “When I started out, like 20 years ago, I could count with my fingers the female directors I knew in Mexico; and today, there are almost 100,” says Natalia Beristáin, director of 2017’s Morelia Audience Award winner “The Eternal Feminine,” a portrait of major Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos, and now the Netflix-backed “Noise” (“Ruido”), which world premieres at this week’s San Sebastián. “The push for diversity is “starting, it’s definitely something that as a filmmaker I sense every more and more,” Beristáin adds. “When I was growing up, you could catch LGBTQ films by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and Julián Hernandez, but there wee very few films, you had to watch them almost hiding and then wait months for the next LGBTQ movie to be released,” remembers Bruno Santamaría, a Gold Hugo best doc winner at the 2020 Chicago Festival for “Things We Dare Not Do.” Now, in contrast, a significant percentage of Mexican movies explore sexual identity, he
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