Mexico looks behind blue eyes

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Mexico shows no signs of ending its recent sudden infatuation with its Mennonite community. Members of the Christian Anabaptist denomination have lived in the country for decades, concentrated mainly in the northern state of Chihuahua, keeping to their simple, materially spartan lives and attracting little notice from outsiders.

That seems to have changed with last year’s release of the film ‘Luz Silenciosa’ (Silent Light) by the prodigiously gifted Mexican director Carlos Reygadas (pictured). The movie, which won the jury prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and is to open in the U.S. this year, is an intricate moral fable about a Mennonite married man who is having an affair with a Mennonite woman. Since the film’s debut, parts of the Mexican media have been reporting on Mennonites as if they were a strange new discovery rather than a long-standing thread in the country’s multiethnic social fabric.

— Reed Johnson in Mexico City