On Wednesday night, the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) once again spread the red carpets to receive guests and the press in its 19th edition, after last year it was carried out in a hybrid way, although highly restricted in its face-to-face version.
For the first time in the film competition, the Mariano Matamoros Theater in the Michoacan capital was set up as a screening room and opening venue, where the film “Annette” was screened (and simultaneously in at least three more rooms), feature films with the one that the French director Leos Carax won the award for Best Direction at the recent edition of the Cannes Film Festival. The so-called “enfant terrible” of French cinema appeared in the Michoacan capital to present his new film and be the subject of a retrospective throughout the meeting that will extend its activities until next November 1.
In addition to Carax and other figures from the Mexican film industry, the presence at the opening gala of the FICM of the officials of the federal Ministry of Culture stood out: the undersecretary of Cultural Development, Marina Núñez Bespalova, and the director of the Mexican Institute of Cinematography ( Imcine), María Novaro Peñalosa.
Prior to the screening of the film, two conciliatory speeches were given by the federal authorities and the president of the film meeting and general director of Cinépolis, Alejandro Ramírez Magaña.
“Mexican cinema is living a time of splendor, it is living a time that deserves that we also support and strengthen public institutions,” declared the Undersecretary of Cultural Development and explained that the meeting has become, by its own merit, an epicenter for interaction with cinematographies from other countries.
“In the Ministry of Culture of the government of Mexico we are pleased that the spotlight is towards the deepest part of the country. We are happy to agree on the need to train young artists in different disciplines and thereby provide them with new opportunities to exploit their creative potential ”, Núñez Bespalova added.
Then, on behalf of the founders of the festival, its president, Alejandro Ramírez Magaña, declared that the cinematographic community of our country has demonstrated its strength and resilience in the more than 18 months since the beginning of “one of the most challenging and uncertainties that the film industry has faced throughout its history ”. However, he acknowledged, the seventh art community is still standing.
For her part, the director of Imcine declared that “the Morelia International Film Festival in these 19 years has contributed very strongly to building the audiovisual heritage of this country and developing Mexican cinema.”
Year after year, Novaro added, “the festival offers us a cinema that builds through exchanges, ideas, stories, proposals, projects, production agreements; It offers us a cinema that comes from communities and that is made for the communities, it offers us a generous, broad, diverse, daring cinema, with different voices that come from the state of Michoacán, from all of Mexico and the best in the world. It offers us a contemporary cinema, but also a recovered cinema that allows us to try to understand each other and get to know each other better by looking at our past ”.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx