Mexican Cinema

Mexico built one of the most productive film industries in the Spanish-speaking world during its Golden Age, exporting melodrama, ranchera musicals and comedy across Latin America and defining a shared popular culture well beyond its borders.

After a long fallow period, a new generation emerged around the turn of the century whose work travelled internationally and whose directors went on to considerable success in English-language filmmaking, an unusually direct pipeline from a national cinema to the centre of the industry.

Domestically, contemporary Mexican film is marked by directness about violence, migration and inequality, often in registers that resist the consolations of genre.