54 years have passed since the Avándaro Festival, the ‘Mexican Woodstock’ considered “the last act of rebellion of youth” on the seventies rock that today lives in the photographic memory of the Mexican Graciela Iturbide and the false documentary “cars, motorcycle and rock” of the director José Manuel Cravioto.
Among myths, lost materials and hundreds of photographs -many of them from Iturbide (1942), considered the best of his time -, the filmmaker, by the hand of Mexican producer Javier Nuño, says that he sought to tell the “side B of the most important counterculture festival in the history of Mexico”.
For the director, this party, originally baptized as “Rock and Wheels of Avándaro”, a town in the State of Mexico, represented “the last great act of rebellion of youth” of the seventies, formed that September 11 and 12 by 300,000 young people still marked by the recent wound of the student killing of Tlatelolco in 1968 and the massacre of Corpus Christi in 1971 The “The Halconazo”.
“I like side B, the contrasts; I find it more fun to look for, scratch and not do what everyone does to adapt ‘Best Sellers’,” says Cravioto, who with this film exposes one of the less known stories of Avándaro: that of his organizers, the former president of the Méxican Football Federation, Justino Compeán, and Eduardo “El Negro” López.
When he was one day with Compeán-who had presented a book with the images of Iturbide-he understood that the origin of the festival, qualified as a “degenere” of drugs and sex by the government of former president Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) and the most conservative cutting means, was in the attempt of two “strawberries” friends (high-class) to make a “strawberry” event on sports cars.
“The origin of this festival was once again about the contrasts of Mexico, which are the themes that I love,” says the “Diablero” director and a member of the management team of season two of “Berlin”, the series derived from “La Casa de Papel”.
“Cars, Mota and Rocanrol” was filmed in 16 millimeters and with Super 8 cameras, and has the leading performances of Emiliano Zurita (Justino) and Alejandro Speitzer (Eduardo), who, in a mixture of reality and fiction, interpret with humor the organizers of this party in Avándaro, a tourist settlement of the State of Mexico surrounded by luxury residences.
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Mexico maintains ‘to blame music’
As if they had not spent 54 years, Cravioto (1981) argues that in Mexico it is still “blaming music” for the country’s evils, as happened in the seventies with Echeverría that silenced rock, only that now it is with the “corridos lying down”, referring to the position of the Government of Mexico that defined them as a genre of “apology to violence”.
“Instead of blaming the corruption that is in Mexico, blaming that there is no security plan (real) and that it seems we are practically at war with so many dead that there is very easy to blame music, as when they said that rock was demoralizing,” he argued.
Also, he reflects, “La Mota still is unworthy” and the concerts are still perpetrated by the military “thus it happened with the multiforo Alicia”, referring to the eviction of capital police and federal forces of the recital of the Basque musician Fermín Muguruza in Mexico City on May 30.
“Cars, Mota and Rocanrol” opens during the framework of the Avándaro Festival and is available in cinemas as an invitation to revive the “social communions” away from what the music industry and social networks dictates.
With EFE information
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