A Landmark Mexican Film Grips a Young Director

“I urgently need some tequila,” says Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, aligning in front of him a shot glass filled to the brim and a frosted bottle of Corona. But he forgets both drink and chaser as soon as he begins to talk about “Canoa,” one of three films the guest curator recommended to the IFP/West--Los Angeles Film Festival lineup.

Cuaron and “Canoa” director Felipe Cazals are being feted by the Mexican consul in an upscale West Hollywood restaurant just as a screening of the seminal 1975 Mexican picture is in progress a few blocks away at the Directors Guild of America. The film is a historical and cinematic landmark of sorts, but Cuaron decided to showcase it during the festival for personal reasons. When he was 14 and growing up in Mexico City, he saw “Canoa” and became unable to shake its grip on his soul. He went back to watch it over and over again. “I was so used to seeing a Mexican cinema that was poor in terms of craft and not very interesting. But,” Cuaron recalls, his eyes glowing enthusiastically, “in this film I was confronted with something powerful and felt touched by it in every regard.”

Eventually the movie bore an imprint on his own work, becoming a source of inspiration for “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” the road adventure marking two boys’ initiation into manhood which Cuaron co-wrote and directed. The film shattered 2001 box-office records in his native Mexico and is currently enjoying a prolonged run as one of the most successful foreign-language films to have landed in U.S. theaters this year.

To American audiences ready to sink their teeth into more south-of-the-border cinema, Cuaron suggests Cazals, a director who came up with the new wave of Mexican cinema of the ‘60s and ‘70s. “He just brings a natural narrative intelligence to a theme, which in his best movies is based on a real event,” says Cuaron. “Canoa,” which the “Y Tu Mama” director says popped in his head when festival organizers asked him to pick three of his favorite pictures, “still continues to have an impact in Mexico to this day.”

In an austere but vigorous visual style, “Canoa” embroiders on actual events on Sept. 14, 1968, in the mountainous hamlet of San Miguel de Canoa. Stirred into collective hysteria by a Machiavellian priest, a mob of local residents lynched several workers from the nearby Puebla University, whom they mistakenly thought part of the radical student movement gathering momentum in Mexico City at the time. The story unfolds as a would-be documentary, with dialogue reconstructed from the testimonies of participants but punctuated by the remarks of an omniscient, skeptical on-screen narrator. (It was this idea of a narrator who periodically interrupts the flow of the plot and opens the story to a wider context that Cuaron borrowed in “Y Tu Mama.”)

A study in human group psychology and mass manipulation, the film traces the chilling, step-by-step anatomy of a particular atrocity, which it ultimately transcends to achieve broader relevance. “ ‘Canoa’ is a metaphor for something bigger,” says Cuaron, referring to the parallel between the villagers’ act of violence and what he calls the biggest scar in his country’s psyche, the Oct. 2, 1968, massacre of student protesters by government troops in Mexico City. To this day, the bloodbath remains cloaked in silence. No precise number of victims has ever been released, but it is estimated there were a couple of thousand. The fact that only seven years later “Canoa” was able symbolically to drag the heavily censored event into plain view on screen “is one of the many things I admire about this movie,” says Cuaron.

From across the table, director Cazals explains in Spanish that the production was able to skirt government censorship because it was financed jointly with funds from a bank and a percentage from the salaries of everybody who worked on it, from the director to the last technician.

Although “Canoa” is about mass psychology, “the film doesn’t disregard the human experience,” says Cuaron. There are unforgettable individual characters--like the manipulative priest Meza, played by Enrique Lucero, remarkable for his signature dark shades and gift for exalted rhetoric.

In long, static shots, the camera observes the throngs of townsfolk inflamed by Father Meza’s anti-communist sermons closing in on the Puebla workers they mistake for leftist activists. At the point of contact, unspeakable violence is shown unflinchingly, with men and even women with babies in tow participating in the carnage. At the edge of the human maelstrom, two villagers are seen calmly engaged in a conversation about their animals’ health.

“In ‘Canoa’ the violence is brutal but honest,” says Cuaron. He explains that Cazals shows acts of cruelty that are meant to embarrass, not titillate, the audience. “He is not trying to give an ideological lesson, but simply capture a social moment: Those workers represent the people of Mexico. Some are pro-students, some are indifferent to them. But even though they believe that the student rebellion is alien to them, the violence ends up affecting everybody in the end,” he says.

Soon the two directors climb into a white minivan that hurtles along Sunset Boulevard toward the theater where the conclusion of “Canoa” is being played out on screen.

In a foreshadowing of reality, the film closes on a celebratory note with villagers attending a local festival. Likewise, the 1968 Olympic Games that began in Mexico City shortly after the student massacre seemed to all but erase the horror of the act from the public consciousness.

The film was honored with a Silver Bear at the 1976 Berlin Film Festival but has been rarely seen outside Mexico, “for reasons we can only blame on Mexican bureaucrats,” says Cuaron. In the face of the film’s testimony, the inhabitants of the real village of Canoa have remained in denial, director Cazals explains to the festival audience through a translator at a question-and-answer session following the screening. Last year on the day commemorating the killing, a banner went up in the local church proclaiming, “What the movie says is not true.”

“I think you just experienced an amazing film, and I’m proud of that,” Cuaron tells an audience that stands up and roars in response.

And for those who wonder whether an American audience can forge an emotional connection with an act of violence committed some 30-odd years ago in a village deep in the rural heart of Mexico, Cuaron has a simple answer: “An injustice in one part of the Earth affects the whole mankind. A genocide does not affect only the victims, but humanity itself.”

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The other two features selected by Cuaron for the festival--Jacques Rozier’s “Adieu Philippine” and F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise”--screen at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., on Friday at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m., respectively. (866) FILMFEST, or visit www.lafilmfest.com.