“During the decades when the country’s economy was growing at a fast pace, here Buñuel follows a group of kids in the slums of Mexico City, revealing that Mexico was not all perfect.”Īlthough the film was pulled from theaters after only three days amid outraged protests, critics were still able to recognize its merits when it was selected for the 1951 Cannes festival, poet Octavio Paz even distributed an essay praising Buñuel, who’d go on to win Best Director that year for Los Olvidados.
“The film is iconic in its portrayal of marginalized people,” says Gutiérrez. Instead of morality and psychology, the film confronts existential issues about life and love poverty is presented not to elicit pity but to present a reality that contradicts what had been commonly represented in the film industry of the time. Directors such as Emilio Fernandez, whose Xochimilco ( Maria Candelaria) won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1946, had created and popularized a Mexican iconography with stylized landscapes and depictions of indigenous people designed to enchant and amaze, instead of merely illustrate.īuñuel’s Los Olvidados, a relentlessly grim portrayal of a group of poverty-stricken juvenile delinquents in Mexico City’s Nonoalco neighborhood eviscerated such overly romantic window-dressing and replaced it with visceral realism. The following iconic films portray Mexico City through the years and myriad social and political changes.īy the 1940s, Mexican cinema had become well known for its overly exoticized, mystical representations of the country’s indigenous population. His selection of films that best encapsulate and illustrate life in Mexico City creates not a picturesque travelogue but a broad-spectrum glimpse of the disparate social classes who call the D.F., or Distrito Federal, home. “Mexico City is not as visually iconic as New York,” Gutiérrez explains. Gutiérrez, founder of Cinema Tropical, a Latin American film programming, publicity and distribution organization based in New York City, and the co-director of Tucson Cine Mexico, the longest-running festival of contemporary Mexican cinema in the United States. Some of the best movies set in Mexico City similarly examine tensions between what the city was and what it is, says Carlos A. The film also operates as a sort of paean to the neighborhood in which the writer-director spent his childhood Cuarón painstakingly re-created the Tepeji Street home he grew up in and blocks in the surrounding neighborhood of Roma, which had been developed in the early 20 th century with Art Nouveau mansions to house Mexico City’s elite, but by the film’s setting of the 1970s had waned in popularity. In his 2018 Oscar-winning film Roma, Alfonso Cuarón delivers a portrait of a Mexico City in flux, exploring issues of race, class and ambition in an era marked by unease and unrest.