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* The Austrian Film Museum

"Beginning in the early 1930s and continuing for a quarter-century, Mexico was home to one of the world’s most colorful and diverse film cultures: not many other countries could claim a comparable range of production, diversity of genres and number of master filmmakers. The excellence of Mexican cinema was founded on its commercial strength - Mexico supplied all of the Spanish-speaking markets in Central and South America, and delivered several box-office successes in the United States as well. During the thirties, the country also became an important refuge for European exiles. Numerous filmmakers and craftsmen had their own (usually semi-secret) Mexican Period, and German-born Alfredo B. Crevenna became Mexico’s most prolific director. In the 1940s, few other film cultures were quite as potent.

Today, the riches of this Golden Age have been nearly forgotten: in Europe, one is more likely to find DVDs of Mexican wrestling films than the masterpieces of Emilio Fernández or Fernando de Fuentes. Milestones such as Vámonos con Pancho Villa (1935, De Fuentes) or Rio Escondido (1948, Fernández) are completely unknown. The Film Museum retrospective thus offers a rare glimpse at the singular beauty of this film culture and the genius of its masters - such as the enigmatic Emilio ‘El Indio‘ Fernández who is represented by five films. The retrospective also traces the Mexican footsteps of two seminal foreign artists: Sergei Eisenstein and Luis Buñuel - the former a key influence in the development of a national film idiom, the latter a maverick on the margins of the film industry whose works often undermined and contradicted mainstream themes and approaches."

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MIA

La mujer sin alma (Fernando de Fuentes, 1943)
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