Luis Mandoki and ‘Fraude Mexico 2006’
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Agustin Gurza reviews Luis Mandoki’s controversial documentary about Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftist opposition candidate who lost Mexico’s 2006 election to President Felipe Calderón by a hair’s breadth.
‘Luis Mandoki has been called the Michael Moore of Mexico, a filmmaker whose overtly partisan documentaries preach messages to viewers who are already inclined to believe. But that’s not the worst thing his critics had to say of Mandoki’s most recent film, which purports to prove fraud in the Mexican presidential election of 2006. One writer compared the director, who is Jewish, to infamous Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, who championed her friend Adolf Hitler in the 1934 film ‘Triumph of the Will.’’Mandoki acknowledges he’s a supporter of leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who lost by a hair to President Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN. But he argues there’s a difference between producing propaganda and making films with a point of view.’ ‘I’m not doing propaganda; I’m showing a piece of the truth,’ says the veteran director of Hollywood films such as ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ and ‘Message in a Bottle.’ ‘
Even though the elections are long over, AMLO (as López Obrador is popularly known here in Mexico) remains a loud critic of Calderón. His supporters call López Obrador Mexico’s ‘legitimate’ president.
Read the rest of the review of Manodki’s documentary ‘Fraud’ here.
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-- Deborah Bonello, in Mexico City