By IPS Correspondents
MEXICO CITY, Feb 26 2007 (IPS)

The 79th Oscar awards ceremony left Mexico with a bittersweet taste. Films by Mexican directors were nominated for Academy Awards in 16 categories, but only earned four – for art direction, cinematography, make-up and musical score. Nevertheless, Mexicans made their mark.

In Sunday’s ceremony in Hollywood, “Pan’s Labyrinth” directed by Guillermo del Toro took three Oscars, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel” took the award for best original score.

But the third film directed by a Mexican filmmaker, “Children of Men” by Alfonso Cuarón, came away empty-handed, although it was nominated for three awards.

Although the Oscars for best director and best film were awarded elsewhere, the nominations themselves and previous prizes won by these movies spread the local film artists’ fame abroad, and awakened keen interest in Mexican talent, which is attracting glances from giant Hollywood studios.

“We hope that the achievements of Mexican directors, which are the fruit of their own work, will boost the film industry in our country, and that funding will become available for productions,” critic Rey Ojeda told IPS.

Mexicans Eugenio Caballero and Guillermo Navarro won the Oscar for their work in “Pan’s Labyrinth”, for best art direction and cinematography, respectively. The film also took the award for make-up, by Spaniards David Martí and Montse Ribé.

Most Mexican on-line media outlets carried front-page stories Monday with reports on the Academy Awards ceremony, and commentary full of disappointment over the meagre number of trophies earned. The unprecedented number of nominations for Mexican-directed films had sparked an enormous amount of enthusiasm.

In Congress, legislators are debating the idea of honouring the three Mexican filmmakers, and President Felipe Calderón plans to do the same.

The Oscars awarded on Sunday brought the number of gold statuettes awarded to films with Mexican participation to eight. In 1953 and 1957, they went to Mexican actor Anthony Quinn, a naturalised U.S. citizen, and in 1972 film producer Miguel Arango won awards for a documentary and a short film.

“This Sunday’s prizes are really the first, because Quinn was actually more of a U.S. citizen than a Mexican, and Arango just provided the money for two films, which is important, but doesn’t involve creativity,” said Ojeda.

“Each of them (Cuarón, González Iñárritu, and del Toro) has a very distinct style of film-making. Each has a clear perspective to their stories. What makes them unique is that each has a language (of film-making and directing) all to themselves,” explained Charles Copayo, a film critic for the “El Nuevo Herald” newspaper, a Miami-based publication whose target audience are the millions of Hispanics in the south Florida area.

“There isn’t any director under 50 in Hollywood that comes close to what any of them (the three Mexican directors) can do,” he told IPS.

“Babel” tells three separate stories, which are based in Japan, Mexico, Morocco, and the United States. González Iñárritu, 43, does not present all three stories in a chronological narrative order. Instead, he disorganises them through the editing, and viewers gradually come to see that they are all indirectly, and improbably, connected by one event.

“Children of Men” is also a bleak drama, but one that is set in 2027. In the film, Cuarón, 45, presents a world without children, where women are infertile and people are pitiless and full of opportunism.

Del Toro, 42, has made a movie that has a nightmarish quality in “Pan’s Labyrinth.” In Spain, in 1944, ten-year old Ofelia finds a stone labyrinth in a wooded area, in which she meets a faun who leads her on a series of adventures. Ofelia’s main enemy is her stepfather, Captain Vidal, a sadistic military officer.

Incorporating elements from “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and “The Wizard of Oz”, the film is both a horror-filled fairy tale and also a commentary about the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939-1975).

What all three of these movies have in common is that death and violence are integral to the plots.

Stacy Perskie, a Mexico City-based assistant director who has worked on “Apocalypto,” “Titanic,” “The Legend of Zorro” and other movies, told IPS that “None of these three films are generic in tone, so I don’t think that you will see Hollywood trying to copy these guys’ films. Their styles are so distinctive that it would be difficult for Hollywood to mass produce movies that attempt to mimic their styles.”

Perskie – who was slated to be an assistant director for “Babel” but was busy working on “Apocalypto” – said that “Here in Mexico, from what I detect from people’s opinions about these three films, there are a lot of mixed opinions.”

“In one sense, I know that people here are very proud that they can make interesting and profitable Hollywood films, but on the other hand, I know for a fact that there are many Mexicans, and also many people in the Mexican film industry, that want González Iñárritu, del Toro and Cuarón to come back to this country and make films for Mexican audiences,” she said.

All three left Mexico several years ago to seek their fortunes in Hollywood, the mecca of Western commercial film-making, and they met with success. But they did not cut their ties with their own country, and have returned regularly to take up film projects here.

Their growing fame and the recent nominations for the Oscars gave rise to intense debate over whether this phenomenon can be said to reflect the health of Mexican filmmaking, as their films depend on foreign sponsorship and the actors come from various countries.

Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote the screenplay for “Babel”, said that the awards “call for reflection on the part of the authorities and society as a whole about the future of the Mexican film industry.”

Mexico has made an average of 40 films a year since the mid-1990s. Several of these have not been shown in the country, because of obstacles put up by the film distributors. This production level is well below that of the golden age of local filmmaking in the 1940s and 1950s, when an average of over 90 films were produced every year.

The attention now being attracted by Mexican filmmakers, screenplays, cameramen, editors, sound engineers, actors and directors “should no doubt be noted, not just out of national pride and joy, which is perfectly valid, but also for the implicit underlying messages and signals conveyed,” said film critic Rafael Aviña, who writes for several local media.

“Apart from the obvious national loss of talented individuals who are emigrating to other countries, and the difficulties they experienced in developing their respective specialties in their own country, there is a clear need to see films as an important cultural good belonging to everybody, and at the same time as a viable business proposition which requires economic incentives,” said Aviña.

“I think all three (directors) have earned this. They have earned their credibility to have freedom in the Hollywood system. This leads to inspiring other young film-makers, like myself, to do better, to try to make good, interesting films. So all of this craze about the Mexican film industry can only grow, and the situation can only get better for us down here,” opined Perskie.

Hollywood has already spied business opportunities in Mexico. Warner, Columbia and Disney have opened offices in this country, and their executives have announced that they are interested in working here with local talent. They have several projects on the drawing board, and in some cases they are linking up with Mexican producers.

“The challenge is to benefit from the transnational entertainment companies without sacrificing the language and interests of purely Mexican films, which are one of our essential cultural expressions, especially when we’re being bombarded by junk commercial films,” critic Ojeda said.

* With additional reporting by Mark Weisenmiller in Tampa, Florida, USA.

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