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Mexican Filmmakers Say 'Hola Oscar'

By Daffodil Altan, New America Media

SAN FRANCISCO--Last January a group of Mexican immigrants made headlines not because they had been rounded up by immigration agents, but because they received a bunch of Academy Award nominations. It is the first time in the history of the awards that Mexicans have received so many nominations (16 in all). There's something about Latino filmmaking, and Mexican filmmaking in particular, in the air these days.

"There is, I think, some glamour to being Mexican in the U.S. now that Mexicans are dismissed as the illegal population in the United States -- aliens existentially," says Mexican-American essayist Richard Rodriguez. The three films by Mexican directors up for awards this year are not Mexico-centric tales. The directors' visions are distinctly global, and their films aggressively confront some of the most relevant global issues of our time: immigration, borders and war.

Those directors and their films are Alfonso Cuarón ("Children of Men"), Alejandro González Iñárritu ("Babel") and Guillermo del Toro ("Pan's Labyrinth").

"They seem preoccupied by the world in a way quite different from other Hollywood directors," Rodriguez says. "Maybe the obvious advantage of being Mexican in the world at the moment is that -- walled off from the United States -- the Mexican feels the necessity for scaling, both in one's imagination and in one's heart, the wall. So 'Pan's Labyrinth' takes place in Franco's Spain. 'Children of Men' takes place in apocalyptic London, and 'Babel,' of course, takes flight from La Jolla, California, to journey to Morocco, to Japan and to Tijuana. Meanwhile Hollywood is churning out franchises -- like Spider Man Five and Superman Ten, and Friday the 13th Part Eight," Rodriguez says.

"Their vision of the world is international, globalized and very accurate," says Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Pelayo, who worked with the three directors in Mexico in the early 1990s and now serves as Consul for Cultural Affairs at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. But, he says, "You cannot explain the presence of all these directors without explaining the films that were made in Mexico in the 1990s." During that time the Mexican government upped its financing of Mexican films with the goal of generating productions that could be distributed internationally. It was in the early 1990s that Cuarón, Iñárritu and del Toro made their directorial debuts with their first bigger budget films. And in 1993, the Mexican film "Like Water for Chocolate" became the highest grossing foreign film released in the United States at the time, marking Mexico's first big successful export to American box offices.

But some believe that the global tendencies of Mexican filmmakers have more to do with their having been obliged to work abroad. Alfonso Cuarón, whose apocalyptic "Children of Men" is set in an immigrant-hostile London 20 years from now (where the film was also shot), has criticized the lack of financial support by the Mexican government to grow its own film industry. At a press conference in Mexico last winter he said Mexican filmmakers are having to leave the country as its "luxury braceros," referring to the infamous bracero program that brought Mexican agricultural workers to the United States during a World War II labor shortage and then failed to keep its promise of a pension fund for those workers.

Diego Luna, who starred opposite Gael Garcia Bernal in Alfonso Cuarón's "Y Tu Mama También" told the popular Mexico City magazine, "Proceso" last month that the various Oscar nominations for Mexicans don't reflect a strengthening on the part of Mexico's film industry, but the industry’s inability to keep Mexican filmmakers working in Mexico. "We have great directors that have to go and film elsewhere," he said. The triumph, Pelayo says, is not of Mexican cinema but of filmmakers who were incubated in Mexico.

"If the conditions don't exist you have to leave the country," says Pelayo of Mexico's limited film budget and near non-existent industry. "You would have to not make a lot of other films if you're talking about making a $30 million film," he says. And Mexico simply cannot support large-scale productions. Last year 60 films were produced in Mexico, all with much smaller budgets. He believes, however, that without the government’s initial investment to increase film budgets in the 1990s in order to export films, today's big Mexican filmmakers -- and the Mexican cinematographers, technicians and actors that have succeeded along with them -- could not have made the international leaps that helped to eventually land them in Hollywood.

It remains to be seen how the nominees, if awarded, will comment on the global immigration issues that are touched on in two of the films. After winning the Golden Globe for best picture, Alejandro González Iñárritu, accepting the award from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, shook his hand and joked about the current immigration climate in the United States, "I swear I have my papers in order, Governor, I swear." The glittery ascension of Mexican filmmakers and actors coincides with the ongoing incarceration and deportation of fellow Mexicans who, like their film-industry compatriots, have left their country for better opportunities abroad. "I think the inclination of the U.S. artistic community is to find Mexicans chic, precisely because we are outlaw," Richard Rodriguez says.