Abstract
Documentaries are growing in popularity in Mexico, and have more freedom to broadcast facts and challenge government lies, writes
But Mexican documentaries were rare when Presumed Guilty premiered at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival in November 2008.
The Emmy-winning film tells the story of a young man wrongfully imprisoned for murder, and follows the successful legal campaign to have his conviction overturned. Through interviews and court footage, Presumed Guilty put the ugly facts of Mexico’s judicial system on full display.
After a successful run on the international film festival circuit, the documentary was aired on US television in July 2010 and went on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism.
But when it was finally given a theatrical release in Mexico, in February 2011, a judge ordered cinemas to remove the film in an apparent effort to avoid scandal.
“As soon as the ban started, we knew interest would soar,” Negrete told Index. “Instead of crying about it, we started talking about the things that had to be changed.”
Negrete and Hernández, both lawyers, also faced death threats and 19 lawsuits. But the scandal sparked a publicity storm that made their film the most watched documentary in Mexican history. Nearly 1.7 million Mexicans went to see it at cinemas, and it became the country’s most downloaded film of 2011.
The censorship campaign kept judicial reform in the headlines. The country had passed a string of new laws designed to improve the justice system in 2008, introducing more open trials and requiring them to be filmed. However, the courts were slow to change.
Presumed Guilty generated massive public interest in the reform’s implementation, which was always Negrete’s principal aim.
“I am an accidental film-maker,” she said. “[The documentary] was an important visual companion to the reform.”
Negrete credits Cinépolis, the country’s largest cinema chain, with the film’s success. The company distributed the documentary for free and provided pro-bono legal support when it came under fire.
Cinépolis has long been a promoter and defender of non-fiction films in Mexico. The cinema chain was an early backer of Ambulante, the documentary non-profit, which was founded by actors Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, along with film producer Pablo Cruz and social activist Elena Fortes. Since 2005, Ambulante has run a two-month documentary festival that tours the country and has screened films in more than 150 venues. All of the most famous Mexican documentaries made since its first edition were screened by the festival.
But Ambulante has relied on the support and infrastructure of Cinépolis from the beginning.
“In Mexico, we still have a virtual duopoly of television, with two media outlets controlling the vast majority of channels,” said Fortes. “The print media also suffers from indirect censorship because they depend on government advertising to survive. It is a great privilege that documentary film-makers can maintain their autonomy and have access to spaces like Cinépolis.”
For the cinema chain, the Ambulante partnership has a positive impact on brand image and credibility. Meanwhile, Ambulante Beyond, the educational branch of the organisation, directly provides a platform for excluded minorities.
“We go to mostly rural, indigenous communities and issue an open call for people interested in making films,” said Meghan Monsour, Ambulante’s director of programming. “We give them the training and equipment to tell their own stories, because there are many films about indigenous communities but we hardly see any films made by those communities.”
The documentaries produced by the students have covered a broad range of topics, including internal migration, living with chronic disease and threats to natural resources. The short films are screened as part of the festival each spring.
“People are very aware that documentary film is not usually a money-making endeavour,” said Monsour. “To understand what’s really happening here, people turn to documentaries.”
A scene from Mexico’s most watched documentary Presumed Guilty, featuring Antonio Zúñiga who was wrongly imprisoned for murder
CREDIT: Presumed Guilty
Ambulante also promoted the two documentaries nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Ariel Awards – Intimate Battles, about domestic abuse, and Devil’s Freedom, about Mexico’s staggering problem of violence.
Everardo González, the director of Devil’s Freedom, says the documentary genre has “begun to fill the vacuum left by the traditional media in Mexico”.
González says that media outlets often steer clear of controversial subjects to avoid falling out of favour with the government or private interests, who provide vital advertising funds. Documentary film-makerss, on the other hand, are rarely dependent on such advertising.
“Documentaries play an important role in terms of freedom of expression,” he said. “When you are working without editorial concerns or advertising in mind, you truly have control.”
Trust in the media has declined by 12% in less than a decade, according to Consulta Mitofsky, a Mexican pollster. The same survey shows that trust in the presidency has dropped by 21% over the same period. A 13% drop has been recorded since 2014, when a wave of corruption allegations rocked President Enrique Peña Nieto.
The most serious scandal of that year arose around the investigation into the kidnapping of 43 students from Ayotzinapa College in the southern state of Guerrero, one of Mexico’s most violent regions.
The government claimed that local police detained the students and handed them over to a drug cartel, who murdered them, mistakenly believing they belonged to a rival gang.
But public scepticism about that version of events triggered protests and permanently marred the president’s reputation.
A documentary about the students and the painfully slow investigation, Ayotzinapa: The Turtle’s Pace, was included in this year’s edition of Ambulante.
Co-produced by double Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, the film provides a platform to challenge claims from the government.
The documentary highlights evidence that investigators tortured suspects and manipulated the crime scene, both assertions later supported by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“The ultimate purpose of the documentary is to support those who are not heard, such as the parents and survivors,” said the film’s director, Enrique García Meza. “I hope the film puts additional pressure on the government to clarify the situation.”
French-born documentary film-maker Lu-dovic Bonleux focuses on the same violent state in his film Guerrero, which follows three social activists caught between security forces and drug cartels.
“The film is aimed at Mexicans living in big cities outside Guerrero,” he said. “This audience knows about the conflict but doesn’t have any close connection to Guerrero or dismisses it as a savage state. The idea was to put those people in the shoes of a social activist in Guerrero.”
Bonleux says technology has driven the growth of the genre, as digital cameras have brought down costs. In 2017, 66 Mexican documentaries were made – more than double the number for 2013.
The documentary boom is not limited to Mexico. A 2016 survey by the Centre for Media and Social Impact at the American University, in Washington DC, found that two-thirds of documentary makers felt strongly that this was a “golden era” for the genre. But Bonleux says that documentaries play a special role in Mexico, where they are often the last defence against lies and impunity.
“Reality is so powerful, so complicated and so enraging in Mexico that many people are drawn to the genre,” he said. “You can address contemporary problems through fiction, but sometimes that becomes too dramatic. More often than not, the reality around us doesn’t need any more drama.”