Directed by Hatuey Viveros Lavielle • Documentary • 2014 • 80 minutes
Jorge is preparing to graduate from law school-the first person from his mountain village in Mexico ever to do so. Chayo, his pregnant 16-year-old sister, faces the most difficult decision of her young life. Meanwhile their qu...
Directed by Catherine Gund & Darsha Kyi • Documentary • With Chavela Vargas • 2017 • 93 minutes
Chavela is the captivating look at the unconventional life of beloved performer Chavela Vargas, whose passionate renditions of Mexican popular music and triumphant return to the stage late in life bro...
Directed by Katie Galloway, Kelly Duane de la Vega • Documentary • 2016 • 55 minutes
EL POETA tells the story of renowned Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who ignited mass protests and an ongoing movement for peace after the brutal murder of his 24-year-old son Juan Francisco—collateral damage in a ...
Directed by Gianfranco Rosi and Charles Bowden • Documentary • 2011 • 84 minutes
The term sicario goes back to Roman Palestine, where a Jewish sect, the Sicarii, used concealed daggers (sicae) in their murders of Romans and their supporters. In modern language, a sicario is a professional killer...
Directed by Natalia Almada • Documentary • 2011 • 72 minutes
Martin, the night watchman, arrives with the setting sun in his rumbling blue Chevrolet. The cemetery mascots, EI Negro y La Negra, chase his truck down the road and greet him with wagging tails. The sound of construction fades away as...
Directed by Laura Mulvey • Documentary • With Miriam Margolyes • 1983 • 29 minutes
This tautly structured documentary sheds light on the work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Italian photographer Tina Modotti, women icons of the Mexican Renaissance. The film not only explores the two women's a...
Directed by Chantal Akerman • Documentary • 2002 • 99 minutes
With her unmistakable style Chantal Akerman ("Arguably the most important European director of her generation."—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice) explores the border between the United States and Mexico.
For years immigrants passed thr...
Directed by Jose Cohen • Documentary • 2013 • 82 minutes
Built on a basin surrounded by mountains and with little drainage, Mexico City is facing a water crisis driven by geography, population, and history. With a growing population, a depleted aquifer, and 40 percent of the water being brought ...
Directed by Juan Francisco Urrusti Alonso • Documentary • 2017 • 124 minutes
The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) left a million dead and over 500,000 refugees. Mexico welcomed about 20,000. Among them were the filmmaker’s grandparents, parents, and some of their friends. In Exile: A Family Film tell...
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2009 • 90 minutes
The most highly praised and awarded Mexican documentary in many years, THE INHERITORS by Eugenio Polgovsky immerses us in the daily lives of children who, with their families, survive only by their unrelenting labor.
The film takes...
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2016 • 7 minutes
In Lightbyrinth 21st-century digital technology meets 19th-century animation in homage to eminent physicist James C. Maxwell. Filmed in Cambridge using his original zoetrope, the film conjures a sense of wonder at early image-making ...
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2012 • 54 minutes
A shaman’s mystical rituals, furious electricians on hunger strike and a euphoric football crowd collide in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s central square, the ancient ceremonial heart of the Aztec empire. The documentary essay Mitote(Nah...
Directed by Pau Ortiz • Documentary • 2017 • 68 minutes
As their mother is imprisoned under dubious charges, and the father is non-existent, Ale (18) and Rocio (13) are faced with the greatest challenge possible. They promise each other to keep the family together - especially for their smaller ...
Directed by Carlos Reygadas • Drama • With Carlos Reygadas, Natalia López, Phil Burgers • 2018 • 87 minutes
A family lives in the Mexican countryside raising fighting bulls. Esther is in charge of running the ranch, while her husband Juan, a world-renowned poet, raises and selects the beasts. Al...
Directed by Lisa F. Jackson, Sarah Teale • Documentary • 2017 • 83 minutes
A multi-billion dollar American development is poised to engulf a small coastal community in Mexico with a mega hotel/condo complex. But local people are banding together to save their way of life and the delicate ecosyst...
Directed by Roberto Hernández • Documentary • 2009 • 88 minutes
In December 2005 Tono Zuniga was picked up off the street in Mexico City, Mexico, and sentenced to 20 years for murder based on the testimony of a single, shaky eyewitness. PRESUMED GUILTY tells the heart-wrenching story of a man wh...
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2016 • 93 minutes
The once-paradisiacal waterfall of "El Salto de Juanacatlán" in Jalisco used to be known as the "Mexican Niagara”, a source of pleasure and sustenance for the villages surrounding it. This natural idyll was heavily polluted when an ...
Directed by Mark Becker • Documentary • With Carmelo Muñiz Sánchez • 2005 • 84 minutes
More than just a documentary dispatch from the illegal immigration frontlines, Mark Becker's Romántico evolves from a verite view of undocumented alien subculture to a deeply personal, "beautifully realized" (...
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2014 • 3 minutes
Filmed in Times Square, this short film presents a dystopian vision of urban life in which the celebration of high-finance rewrites the topography of the city, while landscapes and indigenous cultures have been entrapped by a hyperbo...
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2004 • 52 minutes
Polgovsky’s stunning debut immerses the viewer in the impoverished lives of families in the arid desert region of San Luis Potosi in Mexico (situated on the global parallel known as Tropic of Cancer), who survive by selling plants a...
Directed by Matias Meyer • Drama • With Raúl Silva, Elizabeth Mendoza • 2015 • 80 minutes
Yo is a strong young man, but with limited mental skills. He says he is fifteen years old, although he seems to be older. He lives and works in his mother's restaurant by a busy freeway. Yo loves his mother...
