HOLA MEXICO FILM FESTIVAL

Stories From Across Border

The Hola Mexico Film Festival returns to Cinema Paradiso from today, Thursday, November 18, to Wednesday, November 24. For the full program and tickets head to holamexicoff.com.

Mexico is a country which incites hot-blooded passion – a land which piques all of the senses. It’s also a country at war with its own identity: the proud and ancient land, the sun-soaked playground for sozzled US college students and now, sadly, the murder capital of the world.

But while Mexico’s drug trade-fuelled murder toll for 2010 nears 9,000, the country lives on – slightly damaged but far from doomed. And so, it seems, does the country’s film industry.

Now in its fifth year, the Hola Mexico Film Festival is a celebration of film from the other side of the border. Why Hollywood imperialism continues to muffle much indigenous cinema worldwide, Mexico consistently throws up films that match the best in global cinema – with Oscar nominations, Camera d’Or gongs and acclaim from far beyond the dusty frontiers of its evocative landscape.

Featuring 20 films, 2010 is the Hola Mexico Film Festival’s biggest program to date – traversing new features, documentaries and a tribute to Mexican film legend Carlos Carrera.

“I want to show that we are five years old, and fortunately for us the film industry in Mexico keeps doing amazing films,” Festival Director Samuel Douek explains. “We have an amazing array of films to choose from for the program and so we managed to pick some of the best films coming out of Mexico – the top 10 definitely. We also wanted to do a big program, and I think we managed to do that.”

Fuelled on Latina hot-blood and passion, the weighty program features some of the most affecting cinema in recent years; amongst them Revolucion (an all-star tribute to the Mexican Revolution told through 10 short films), Pecados De Mi Padre (Sins Of My Father; a moving documentary from the perspective of Juan Pablo Escobar, the son of the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar) and Ano Bisiesto (Leap Year, the Camera d’Or winning debut by Australian born, Mexican based Michael Rowe).

“I think it’s very real,” Douek says of the trademarks of Mexican cinema. “Mexican films manage to come across as a real story even if they are fiction – they are believable and raw.

“We have very beautiful and clever films that show both sides of Mexico,” he concludes of both the good and bad of the country. “But at the end of the day my job here is to bring good art – good film. Whether they are going to speak of the violence of Mexico is not on my concern list; I want the best quality of filmmaking. I try to stand aside of political and social issues and simply look for amazing film.”

_JULIAN TOMPKIN