CINEMA-MEXICO: State Help for Beleaguered Industry

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Dec 22 1998 (IPS) - The annual ceremony for the Ariel movie awards – the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars – was a somewhat sombre affair this year but the industry is looking toward a new parliamentary bill to help it overcome the flood of U.S. films.

A total of 21 Ariels were handed out by Mexico’s Academy of Film Arts and Sciences with the resounding winner being ‘Por si no te vuelvo a ver'(In case I don’t see you again) which collected nine prizes – including best picture, best actor and best director.

The film tells the story of four elderly musicians who ran away from an old folks’ home where they were often mistreated, only to become unwitting couriers for drug traffickers.

The Ariel prizes were created in 1946, when the Mexican film industry was in its heyday. Now, however, it is in deep crisis, partly because of competition from Hollywood movies which enter Mexico freely under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Another drawback is that there is little money to support the Mexican movie industry, which produced fewer films in 1997 and 1998 than any other years in the last two decades.

Shoring up the flagging industry is the aim of a bill approved by the lower house of Mexico’s congress on the weekend before the award ceremony. The draft law “defines the dual nature of the cinema as an industrial product and a cultural phenomenon,” said Academy president Jorge Fons.

The bill approved by the parliamentarians was not exactly what film-makers wanted, but it provides “the first square meter on which to build the house of our dreams,” Fons added, borrowing a line from the old Mexican film, ‘María de mi corazón’ (Maria, my heartbeat).

The lower house approved the bill after a nine-month debate in which producers, artists and directors, who requested subsidies and screen time, fought publicly with cinema owners and distributors, who invoked the free market.

In the end, the cinema propietors were not obliged to give five percent of their annual receipts to projects to support national film or grant 30 percent of screen time to local productions, as the film-makers had requested. The latter’s demands had been supported by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

On the other hand, the state has agreed to set up a trust fund next year for the Mexican film industry in which the state, independent producers and the private sector will participate. Local films will also be given ten percent of screen time, whereas today, 95 percent of the productions shown are foreign.

The new legislation replaces a 1992 law that deregulated film- making, leaving it to market forces. Even though it was not what film-makers wanted, they should still take advantage of it, said Juan Pablo Villasenor, director of ‘Por si no te vuelvo a ver’.

Filmed with a budget of less than two million dollars – a pittance next to the 60 million dollars the average U.S. film costs – Villasenor’s production received rave reviews and drew blockbuster crowds before receiving the awards.

“It is very important for the film-making community to come together and fight for something that can only benefit Mexican cinema,” such as the new law, said Villasenor.

The production capacity of Mexican studios decreased by 66 percent in the past decade, and the number of viewers shrank by more than 40 percent, according to the National Chamber of the Film Industry.

Ten of the 143 film distribution companies monopolize 98.3 percent of the Mexican market, and almost all of them distribute only Hollywood movies, according to Mexican researchers who prepared a report for the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO).

“The strangling of the screening of national films is a premeditated and opportunistic crime,” said film maker Alberto Bojorquez. “The national film industry is in agony, but it refuses to die.”

Film-makers hope the new law will help the Mexican film industry recover and help bring back the golden era of Mexican cinema that lasted from the 1940s to the 1960s.