25 years ago Mexico lived its greatest democratic transition, a process in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost power; A few days before, in that advance of advance, ‘Amores Dogs’ (2000), a film in which actor Gael García Bernal debuted in a feature film and managed to fulfill his most “unimaginable dreams.”
“My life I don’t understand without ‘Amores Dogs’; it changed me completely. I would never have imagined it, it was a very beautiful dream (…) It is a film that spoke to the entire world and with which Latin America deposited a very strong identification,” explains García Bernal on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the emblematic tape directed by Alejandro González Iñarritu.
At the beginning of the century, thousands of Mexican artists first exercised “freedom of expression and citizenship” with a certain innocence.
That stage was a precursor to numerous feature films that, later, won Oscar awards or Gold Balloons -as in the case of García Bernal -and would receive recognition at European festivals, such as Cannes, by the hand of filmmakers such as Alfonso Cuarón or Guillermo del Toro.
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In the film, scripted by the writer Guillermo Arriaga, the life of three people intersect when two young people suffer a car accident fleeing to a better future, a dream that the protagonists of the story share despite the class difference.
García Bernal looks at the past and, on it, is positive about the current situation of the country, although he acknowledges being “very critical of the slopes” that Mexico still has.
“At that time there were many things that were happening and today we are reaping the triumphs of that. We also see the slopes in a very critical way, and although we recognize the wrong roads, there are many things that have changed for good,” he argues.
Some of those changes, adds Gael García, involved moving from having “perhaps six films” per year brand new tapes. A “fantastic, cultural and vital turn” that today manifests itself, among other forms, in the fact that Mexico City has become “one of the best cities in the world” for the cultural industry.
Why does Amores Dogs achieve such a powerful feeling?
Although Gael García celebrates the arrival of new spectators who can see the tape from their homes thanks to digital platforms; The 46 -year -old actor confesses that he misses that time when a film generated “a lot of expectation” and occupied a “incredibly powerful and strong” cultural place.
“It is a fantastic vital act; experiencing it in a movie theater is essential for the community and the social. I had to live, in this temple with almost a church proportions, which generated the film in many parts of the world: seeing how people were completely crossed,” says Gael García.
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In addition to the reactions in the movie theaters, Gael García remembers how at 21 he read in Internet forums, those spaces that emerged at the beginning of the century and connected many citizens beyond the seats.
“The concept of Internet pages for movies was released at that time. There was a special page for ‘Amores Dogs’ and in the comments the messages sent by people at that time were impressive,” he recalls.
Despite the passing of the years, Gael García, who has a solid career as a producer along with his ally and friend Diego Luna, states that the tape continues to awaken a question between the audience: “What follows for humanity?”
This questioning moves him and leads him to ask: “Why does this film achieve such a crazy, fantastic and energetically powerful feeling?”
‘Amores Dogs’ is restrained on Monday with a special function in one of the most emblematic monuments of Mexico, the Palace of Fine Arts, before the eyes of the citizens who re -connect and remember 25 years later the film he put on the map of this century to the Mexican cinema.
With EFE information
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