MEXICO- The return of the filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu to his native country after 20 years to film Bardo, a film whose common thread is Mexico, its capital, its history, disagreements and bombasts in a time when local cinema is growing in production and original content with a question mark:
Is there a new Golden Age of Mexican cinema?
The era known as the Mexican Golden Cinema includes between mid-1930s to mid-1950s of the last centurywhen some of the iconic films of Mexico were filmed due to their quality and budget outside the State with private studios that were empowered until the appearance of television.
Now it has new economic and social elements that contribute to a narrative that leaves marginal productions behind to jump to big box office moments.
After the pandemic, Mexican film production remained positive for the second consecutive year with the sum of 258 feature filmsaccording to figures from the 2022 Statistical Yearbook of the Mexican Institute of Cinematography (Imcine).
“The Yearbook reports a very favorable, very good, very positive moment in the growth of film production in Mexico for the second consecutive year,” said María Novaro, director of the Institute.
“These are record numbers in the entire history of Mexican cinema and neither the golden age nor the best moments of Mexican cinema have produced so many movies, so many movies.”
And it goes for more. It is estimated that by 2023 there will be more fiction filming, documentaries, animations and experimental tapes with themes ranging from social to comedy; spiritual, biographical, and period in a variety that leaves the dark days of television far behind when only romantic love affairs and love triangles were counted.
In addition, consumption has been added to the high local production. The National Chamber of the Film Industry (Canacine) announced in an assembly with its members that Attendance at movie theaters increased 66% in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022, registering 88 million tickets sold.
“Cinema is back,” said Javier Reyes, Cinemex programming director, with a double post-pandemic message and about a new era of creation that places the country in the fourth place with the best box office, only surpassed by India, the United States and Canada.
Currently, the economic demand of the audiovisual industry in Mexico is calculated by the Motion Pictures Association in around 2,700 million dollars in direct earnings and around 22,000 million indirectly.
The reasons
The brightness that the Mexicans Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro won for Mexico is not minor. “It generated inertia,” explained Avelino Rodríguez, general director of the largest audiovisual production house in the country, The Lift, and president of the National Chamber of the Film Industry.
Partly because of them, US production houses began to trust Mexican talent, to look to the country for its production quality, but also for other reasons related to the transfer of US companies due to “nearshoring”, which means Cheaper labor and without major union problems like in the United States.
The salary of a technical worker in the US film industry is between three and four times higher than in Mexico and in the case of post-production it is 10 times higheraccording to Camcine, which thus explains why foreign direct investment in the film and video industry went from 23 million dollars in 2020 to 5,332 million last year.
In addition to traditional cinema, streaming services recognize the importance of offering content that resonates with local culture and preferences And for them there is growing competition between international giants such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ plus local players such as Claro Video, Blim and Azteca Uno from TV Azteca.
For this reason, the American production houses that have invested in Mexico, many times in association with the local ones, have opted for national themes to gain market with original content that are an opportunity for local talent to show their work and reach a larger audience. wide.
According to the awards granted by the Silver Goddesses equivalent to the Hollywood Golden Globes for the best in Mexican cinema of the year 2022, “Silvia Pinal” stands out for the Female Revelation for Fiona Palomo for the comedy “¡Qué Despadre!” , by Pitipol Ybarra, available on VIX, and Best Supporting Actor and the “Gabriel Figueroa” for Best Cinematography for Joaquín Cossío and Raúl Ramón for their debut feature “El Poderoso Victoria”, on Prime.
The challenges
In recent times, there was a disagreement between the Mexican State and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro for what seemed the interruption of the ariel awardsone of the most important awarded by the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, for going through “a serious financial crisis” due to the lack of budget that the government had to give.
Del Toro, who was trained in a Mexican public school, then denounced that the country was experiencing a “systematic destruction of Mexican Cinema and its institutions” that had taken decades to build, to which the culture secretary replied that it was not true. , that the State continued to contribute money, but with a different distribution.
Del Toro offered to pay the expenses of the award ceremony, but the role of the State in the face of this new wave of cinema bonanza remained up in the air. Will you leave it alone to the market? Will you be a provider or facilitator?
From different trenches, some politicians are committed to attracting investment for local talent. The former head of government of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum met with executives of the US Motion Picture Association of America (MPA) and Amazon Prime to provide hard data on investment while the governor of Jalisco, Enrique Alfaro offered a Payroll Tax exemption and venture capital support for investors.
For some actors, the role of the State must go further and bet on the long term from other trenches: “For an audiovisual literacy in schools, and a law that protects local art films,” said Arcelia Ramírez, star of some of the most famous films Made in Mexico.
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