in conjunction with
Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mexican Embassy, UNAM Cinemathèque

Following its hugely successful retrospective devoted to Luis Buñuel, who made many of his milestone movies in Mexico after being exiled from Spain, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni is focusing once again on the época dorada, the golden age of Mexican cinema.  This is unquestionably one of the most interesting chapters in the global history of the movies, yet it is virtually unknown to the broader European cinema-going public.  The importance of the issues it addresses and the intensity of its expressive force combine to make it one of the surprising episodes in the history of the film industry since its inception.
Mexican cinema came to maturity during World War II, which proved to be an extremely fertile moment in the country's cultural development.  During the clash, the political stance adopted by Mexico, the only Latin American country to have sided wholeheartedly with the Allies, prompted major US investment in the film industry which gave rise, in turn, to the development of an intense productivity in the country and to the subsequent dissemination of its movies throughout the Spanish-speaking world.  This climate was to prove favorable to the development of the artistic potential of such directors of genius as Emilio Fernández, to whom we will be paying a full-fledged tribute in the opening evenings of the retrospective.  In his masterpieces, as in those of the other great directors whose work we will be showing, the traditional melodramatic take, with its excess of passion, cruelty and deep suffering, reaches great heights of psychological complexity and an aesthetic opulence whose strangely modern feel owes a great deal to the directors' bold  and experimental approach.
Taking on board the entire range of Hollywood genres, from melodrama to musical comedy and from political drama to city life, these great directors turned them on their head and saturated their content with sardonic originality.  It was this approach that allowed them to dwell on the more disturbing aspects of the alienating modern rat race and to translate the clashes that it generates into juxtaposed characters of extremely symbolic significance, like the prostitute and the saint, or into such extreme situations as the explosion of sensual vitality and the hatefulness of the fate that frustrates that vitality, offering unique scenarios for analysis that far transcend the initial, yet only skin-deep, impression of picturesque folklore.