Hola Mexico Film Festival 2012

Overview

The sixth annual Hola Mexico Film Festival opens on Thursday, October 25, at Event Cinemas on George Street, with nearly 20 films being shown over a one-and-a-half-week period. Showcasing real Mexico and its way of life, the festival invites you to say goodbye to cliches and hola to the land of the Aztecs, as it should be. Here are five that beckon us.

1. Mariachi Gringo

Directed by Tom Gustafson and starring Martha Higareda, Mariachi Gringo sees a young man, stifled by his small-town life, run away to Mexico to be a mariachi singer. This feature, the opening night film for this year’s festival, explores the reality of following your dreams across geographical and cultural borders, depicting the beauty of Mexico and its folklore.

2. De Panzazo (Barely Passing)

Barely Passing is a harsh look at the gritty truth of the Mexican school system. Directed by Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Loret De Mola, it tells the stories of real students and what the country's future will hold if things don't change.

3. Felix: Autoficciones de un traficante (Felix: Self-Fictions of a Smuggler)

Felix is a home-movie actor and human trafficker. In Felix: Self-Fictions of a Smuggler, he exposes the world around him through his own eyes and reveals the cogs of a very real machine.

4. La brujula la lleva el muerto (The Compass Is Carried by the Dead Man)

Arturo Pons' The Compass Is Carried by the Dead Man sees Chencho, a 13-year old boy, goes to Chicago, following the death of his mother, to search for his older brother. On his journey he meets a man who dies right after letting him hitch a ride on his wagon. Following north on the compass held in rigor-mortic grip, he begins a surreal passage, with no real direction, and meets peculiar characters on the way.

5. Cristiada (For Greater Glory)

With For Greater Glory Dean Wright asks, what price would you pay for glory? Starring Eva Longoria and Andy Garcia, this exhilarating action epic sees a passionate group of men and women risk everything for family, faith, and the future of their country during the 1920s' Cristero war, the daring people's revolt that rocked 20th-century North America.

Image from Mariachi Gringo.