Category: events

Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna launch 4th Ambulante documentary festival in Mexico

Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna launch 4th Ambulante documentary festival in Mexico

| January 30, 2009 | Comments (0)

Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, two of Mexico’s most bankable movie stars, launched the fourth annual Ambulante documentary film festival Friday morning in a packed cinema screening room on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma.

Read More

David LaChapelle makes Mexican debut

David LaChapelle makes Mexican debut

| January 29, 2009 | Comments (0)

David LaChapelle, the surrealist photographer, launched his first-ever show in Mexico City last night in a media scrum that resembled one of his chaotic images.

Read More

Lunar New Year in Mexico City

Lunar New Year in Mexico City

| January 26, 2009 | Comments (0)

The Year of the Ox, the new Chinese lunar year, begins today, and Mexico City’s Chinese community spent the weekend celebrating.

Read More

"Che, the Argentine" premieres in Mexico City

"Che, the Argentine" premieres in Mexico City

| January 14, 2009 | Comments (1)

There were no rabble-rousing speeches, but Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the film version, was greeted by an eager audience at the nearly full Julio Bracho cinema, which hosted the premier of the first part of Steven Soderbergh’s long-awaited portrait of the Argentine revolutionary last night.

“Che, the Argentine,” got its first Mexican screening on the sprawling campus of Mexico’s most influential university, the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico). The movie has, like all upcoming major releases here in Mexico, been selling for weeks now on stands that deal in pirated DVDs, but there remain those who want to see the film on the big screen. The audience was a mixture of all ages, from amorous teenage couples to unaccompanied gray-haired men, and they received the portrait of the much-adored revolutionary with gusto.

Guevara is popular among the sprawling student population here in Mexico City, where he and Fidel Castro, then an exiled Cuban lawyer, planned their Cuban Revolution over dinner and cigars on July 3rd, 1955. The myth and heroic image of the Argentine have replaced a real understanding of the complex man that he was. His face is often emblazoned across flags and T-shirts during student protests and commonly evoked as a universal symbol of social struggle.

Read More

Lydia Cacho publishes manual for parents on detecting child abuse

Lydia Cacho publishes manual for parents on detecting child abuse

| January 12, 2009 | Comments (1)

Lydia Cacho’s celebrity was apparent from the get-go last Thursday night in the trendy Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City, where the journalist launched her new book “Not With My Child” (Con Mi Hij@ No).

Read More

Video: The Virgin of Guadalupe brings Mexicans to their knees

Video: The Virgin of Guadalupe brings Mexicans to their knees

| December 12, 2008 | Comments (0)

Julio Cesar, a 19-year-old metalworker, crawled on his knees for five hours yesterday to reach the Basilica de Guadalupe in Mexico City.

Read More

Mexico City smokers enjoy a bit of nostalgia

Mexico City smokers enjoy a bit of nostalgia

| December 10, 2008 | Comments (0)

For Mexico City’s smokers, who were recently deprived of the pleasure of enjoying their habit in restaurants, bars, offices and other public places, an exhibition celebrating the pleasure and history of tobacco might feel like someone’s blowing smoke in their faces.

Read More

Mexico should pay attention to International Anti-Corruption Day

Mexico should pay attention to International Anti-Corruption Day

| December 9, 2008 | Comments (0)

Mexicans might be encouraged to do a bit of soul-searching today by a United Nations campaign, which has declared December 9th International Anti-Corruption Day.

Read More

Video: Mexico’s method for speedy snowman building

Video: Mexico’s method for speedy snowman building

| December 8, 2008 | Comments (0)

Three-year-old Ismael Arenas Sosa and his father, Edmundo, enjoyed the artificially produced snow in the Zocalo last week. And it appears Mexico’s mayor has devised a rather ingenious way of limiting the wait time for children eager to build their first snowman.

Read More

Media advertising campaign targets violence against journalists

Media advertising campaign targets violence against journalists

| December 4, 2008 | Comments (3)

A television, radio and print advertising campaign is to launch here in Mexico in an attempt by press freedom groups to raise public awareness about violence against journalists.

Read More

Spotlight on dog overpopulation and abuse in Mexico

Spotlight on dog overpopulation and abuse in Mexico

| December 2, 2008 | Comments (1)

Still on the doggy theme of last week, a documentary screening in Mexico City over the weekend focused on how Mexico deals with the thousands of stray dogs roaming its streets. And no, it did not paint a pretty picture.

Read More

Journalists profile conservative activist

Journalists profile conservative activist

| November 14, 2008 | Comments (1)

It turned out to be an unusual book launch. Scheduled to begin at 5pm yesterday afternoon in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City, the authors were to present their profile of Mexico’s most prominent Catholic fundamentalist and anti-abortion campaigner.

Read More

Bajo Juarez campaigns for the dead women of Ciudad Juarez

Bajo Juarez campaigns for the dead women of Ciudad Juarez

| October 7, 2008 | Comments (0)

Lilia Alejandra is one of the 370 women who have disappeared in Mexico’s Chihuahua state since 1993. Her story is the main focus of Bajo Juárez, a documentary film that was five years in the making and opened here in Mexico this weekend.

Read More

Mexico memory march turns violent

Mexico memory march turns violent

| October 3, 2008

Thousands of Mexicans took to the streets yesterday to demand justice for the victims of a mass-killing by Government troops on the night of October 2nd forty years ago. But the protests in Mexico City had a bitter end.

Read More

Mexico to remember massacre 40 years later

Mexico to remember massacre 40 years later

| October 2, 2008 | Comments (1)

Today, people of all ages will march in memory of a massacre that took place forty years ago in Mexico City – an event that remains one of the darkest in the country’s recent and bloody history.

Read More

Video: Mexico’s Military Marches as Citizens React to Yesterday’s Bombings

Video: Mexico’s Military Marches as Citizens React to Yesterday’s Bombings

| September 17, 2008 | Comments (0)

Two explosions during Mexican Independence Day celebrations in the western state of Michoacan killed eight people Monday night and injured dozens more, we reported yesterday.

Read More

NYT: How the drug war impacts civilians

NYT: How the drug war impacts civilians

| September 2, 2008 | Comments (0)

The New York Times has a great piece online today about how just regular citizens are reacting to the drug war.

Read More

Video: Mexicans march for peace

Video: Mexicans march for peace

| August 31, 2008 | Comments (0)

Tens of thousands of people of all social classes and ages marched across Mexico Saturday (August 30th 2008) in protest against high crime levels and rising kidnappings.

Read More

Filming bullfights is not worth dying for

Filming bullfights is not worth dying for

| August 27, 2008 | Comments (0)

My sympathies were a hundred per cent with the animal, who was surrounded by humans mad with booze and testosterone.

Read More

Slideshow: Immigration explored as a concept in Mexico City exhibition

Slideshow: Immigration explored as a concept in Mexico City exhibition

| August 11, 2008 | Comments (0)

The video and photography exhibition Laberinto de Miradas – Labyrinth of Glances – that opened in Mexico City last month in the Cultural Center of Spain – features the kind of images that we are used to seeing in relation to immigration.

Read More

Waiting for a man to die

Waiting for a man to die

| August 7, 2008 | Comments (1)

On Tuesday, I waited for a man to die. Even though several people die every minute of every day, I’ve never known the name of the person that I knew was going to die; neither have I ever known so closely when they were going to die and how. But yesterday I knew.

The man’s name was Jose Ernesto Medellin, and now he is dead. On Tuesday, he was due to die at 6pm at the hands of the Texan government for the brutal rape and murder of two teenage girls in 1993.

Read More

Video: Raising of the flag

Video: Raising of the flag

| August 6, 2008 | Comments (0)

Following last week’s filming session in the Zócalo, where I was denied the chance to film closeup to the military whilst they were raising the ntaional flag, I managed to edit the move into a decent summary of the ritual.

Read More