Daydreaming at my desk, I asked a few of my Mexican colleagues which films they watch at Christmas. Someone offered up Titanic — proving marathon tearjerkers for overstuffed afternoons are a global tradition — whilst another murmured about Love Actually, but there was one title that shook the table into an eruption of agreement: Mi Pobre Angelito.

Mi Pobre Angelito. I drifted off into imagining the plot of this Mexican festive favourite. Perhaps a kid’s action film where Angel Number Four’s costume for the Nativity is stolen in a mixed-up laundry order, prompting undercover spy parents to race across Mexico City and foil a network of crooked laundrettes. Or a Hallmark-style romcom where an overworked lawyer accidentally flies to Oaxaca instead of Ohio, missing her conference and meeting a mysterious “fallen angel” in the Cathedral, inspiring her to sack off the Zoom calls for good.

Awe bordering on fury met my insistence that I have not only never seen but heard of Mi Pobre Angelito and someone kindly summarised the plot. But it’s the same as Home Alone, I say. It’s identical! And that, of course, as I learn in a rosy-faced moment, is because it is Home Alone, and that this film’s star as a festive favourite is steadfast and shines worldwide.

So where are Christmas films made especially for the Mexican audiences so coveted by streamers? And if these films do exist, who is watching them? The answer to that question is ‘obviously they do’ and ‘lots of people’ – including the non-target audience of ‘me’. With a shout out to those not mentioned (Feliz NaviDAD; Feliz Christmas, Merry Navidad; El Sabor de Navidad), here’s an appetizer.

Holiday in Santa Fe (2021, Netflix)

Straight into New Mexico, I know, but this film centres around Mexican family the Ochoas and their attempts to maintain their small business: that most mysterious of enterprises: the all-year Christmas shop. Belinda Sawyer, from festive conglomerate Warm Wishes, comes to buy out the Ochoas and develops steamy feelings for the business-minded son, Tony. Santa Fe is cast as a winter wonderland with ambiguous temperatures where scarves and coats are donned under the beating sun. Business chat combines with romantic wooing as Belinda and Tony discuss how “magic can’t be put into a spreadsheet” and mention the “30% tax break” in Santa Fe no less than twice whilst ice-skating, sharing margaritas, and competing in a ham throwing contest. A masterclass in how to successfully negotiate a deal whilst nurturing good relationships with future in-laws over the festive period. A feat.

Reviviendo la Navidad (2022, Netflix)

This original Spanish title tells you exactly what this film is about whereas the English one, A Not So Merry Christmas, doesn’t, so let’s dive in. Chuy (not coincidentally the nickname for Jesús) shares his birthday with Christmas and resents his chaotic family for constantly forgetting about it. Storming out over dinner, Chuy drinks a cursed shot of tequila served by a shapeshifting Diva Godmother and is condemned to wake up every day thenceforth on Christmas. I found myself marvelling at the way Chuy hardly ages over a decade and that the unseen 364 days of the year don’t spark more chaos in his daily life (what about work? Has he fought with anyone? Been on holiday?). One interpretation could be that this film is an existential musing on the way years drip past in a lethargy of neglect for what really matters. But of course, it’s mainly a caper comedy and kicks off with a big choreographed musical number in a mall for no reason at all, which is always supremely welcome.

Una Navidad No Tan Padre (2020, Netflix)

Begruntled pensioner Servando and his modern family — made up of so many people you’ll need a PhD to understand the connections between them — travel to the beach in a beaten-up van to spend Christmas with glamorous widower, Alicia. Hard-hearted Servando is besotted by the soft-spoken lady of the house and whilst sparks fly, a competition between the families gathers pace on how Christmas should be spent: turkey or bacalao, snow or sand, Santa Claus or the unbearable truth? It’s delicious to hear waves lapping and feel the heat radiating off the baubles and the freneticism of friends and strangers merging over Christmas is relatable. Just don’t try and understand who the three characters turning up in the last ten minutes are, though I think the film’s prequel Un Padre No Tan Padre may offer clues.

How The Gringo Stole Christmas (2017, Netflix)

Imagining a heist film, this instead turned out to be narrative bedfellows with Father of the Bride, with an added strain of that familiar, bittersweet desire to celebrate Christmas “like you did back home.” Bennie, a Mexican landscaper now living in Los Angeles, struggles when his daughter brings home her waif-like ‘gringo’ boyfriend, video game designer Leif, to join the celebrations. Through a loving family of women including Abuelita, who is constantly brandishing either a chela or a jar of Vicks VapoRub, everyone eventually comes round to Leaf, as he’s affectionally misnamed, overwatched by a friendly trio of Cholo wannabe gangsters with a jacked-up bouncing car. Stuffed full of Mexican slang and in-jokes that may or may not have soared over my head, this was nevertheless sweet and a little sassy.

Mi Niño Tizoc (1972, Amazon Prime)

Not a scrap of tinsel in sight, yet the most authentically Christmas-spirited of the selection. We open peering down upon the liquid emerald waterways of Xochimilco and listening to the song of flower sellers Carmelito and his son Tizoc as they calmly punt their trajinera over the water. Discriminated against by other growers for their traditional methods, Carmelito and Tizoc remain steadfast as they battle a fast-changing Mexico City. You’ll want to scream at the screen when Tizoc buys a foul-smelling chicken from under the counter to save money for their Christmas dinner, and experience a heart-pounding hour as Carmelo ventures into the city to find a hospital for his ailing son, transported in a rolled-up carpet on his back. Made by Golden Age filmmaker Ismael Rodríguez, whose real-life son plays Tizoc, this is a visually enchanting step back in time about the ties that bind stronger than any other: the love between parent and child.

The full film is available on YouTube.

Bettine is from the Highlands of Scotland and now lives in Mexico City, working in film development at The Lift, Mexico’s leading independent audiovisual production company.

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The film is the latest documentary by Mexican-American filmmaker Eva Aridjis Fuentes, whose lens often tilts towards misfits, underdogs and those who life has dealt a unique hand. Brought up across various cultures, Eva’s sensitivity to the outsider seems to spin coincidences. None moreso than in creating this documentary, which handles ideas of fate and the uncanny paths of life almost as much as the subject of the film itself.

“Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus” is about a singer whose song you probably know, but whose name you most likely don’t. Released in 1998, “Goodbye Horses,” the track that gives the film its name, is a melancholic floor-filler that has pervaded dancefloors and soundtracks for decades.

Sometime in the 1980s, Hollywood director Jonathan Demme was picked up by a New York taxi driver experimenting with some tracks in her car. Enraptured, Demme used the driver’s song “Goodbye Horses” in his 1988 film “Married to the Mob.” In 1991, he used the song again in his blockbuster “Silence of the Lambs,” drilling the track into the public consciousness. It appeared again in 1993’s “Philadelphia,” where the person behind the unmistakable, earthy voice finally makes a brief appearance.

Diane Luckey — a.k.a. the musician Q Lazzarus — had a lifetime of twists of fate that brought her both as close to the precipice of global fame and as far away from it as possible. In 2019, the “Searching for Q Lazzarus” was published in Dazed and Confused in which a journalist went on the hunt for the elusive singer. The journalist never found Q, who became an urban myth and catnip for internet sleuths.

Four months after the article came out, and 30 years after Jonathan Demme’s taxi encounter, Eva Aridjis got into a New York cab driven by a woman with a colourful turban, a strange star quality and a deep knowledge of music. Eva soon suspected she had just accidentally stepped straight into the legendary singer’s real life. She was right.

Mexico News Daily: I haven’t had a communal cinema experience like that for a long time, where the whole room was in tears by the end of the film. Were you surprised by that kind of reaction?

Eva Aridjis: Well, you know, I’ve been working on this project for five years, which is the longest I’ve ever worked on a film, and it was the hardest film I’ve ever made. For one thing, it was supposed to be completed much sooner and have this happy ending: Q’s comeback tour. I was going to play with the Lazarus part of her name and the structure was going to be the rise and the fall, the resurrection — but that obviously didn’t happen.

There was also the pandemic, which affected funding [Eva raised money to finish the film through a Crowdfunder campaign] but it also meant Q and I had this intense, intimate time together. And, as I think comes across in the documentary, we became incredibly close. It was a big deal for her to trust me and go back to difficult parts in her life that she’d never spoken to anybody about. Even her son, James, didn’t know most of these stories about her — he heard them for the first time in Morelia with everyone else.

But the fact that the legacy of this woman, who is talking from such a place of experience and wisdom, wound up in my hands is very moving for me. And I think it’s impossible not to fall in love with her. She’s this amazing person, you know, expressive and not jaded, wearing all these different wigs in the film, always positive despite her experiences.

So yes, I was happy to see that it was moving other people too because that’s really the whole point of the film. It’s not so much now to get her career restarted but to have this appreciation and attention that she deserves.

MND: There’s a lot about chance and coincidence in the film. The way you met for starters. What were your thoughts and feelings around destiny and the fated paths of life as you made it?

EA: Q and I both very much felt that our meeting was fated. I was aware of her Jonathan Demme story and this idea of two directors meeting her in her taxi and making films with her thirty years apart. I mean, apart from anything, if it wasn’t for Jonathan hearing this tape Q was playing around with, that song would probably be in the garbage somewhere.

On the day I got into Q’s car it was one of those days where everything is just a bit off: I usually take the subway, but I was running late so I got a cab; she didn’t usually work nights but was taking one last shift; her GPS wasn’t working so she asked me for directions: that’s when she said she didn’t know the area because she was from Staten Island.

I had read the Dazed and Confused article [four months earlier, in April 2019] and had been talking about it with a friend — we even spoke about how great it would be to make a film about her — so it was in my mind that she was living in Staten Island. I found it strange she was listening to Neil Young’s “Harvest” — like the whole album start to finish, not just a song on the radio. When I asked her whether she’d ever come across an artist called Q Lazzarus, and she told me her “concert days were over,” that’s when I suspected who she was.

I showed her photos of a t-shirt line I had made when my daughter was born: this one with “Goodbye Horses” and a rocking horse on it. She later told me that when she saw I was also a mother, that’s when she trusted me. I left her my number and some days later she called me to say she’d had a dream about me. I was like “Was this a good dream or a bad dream?” She was like: “Girl, if it was a bad dream, I wouldn’t be calling you.”

 

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A post shared by Eva Aridjis Fuentes (@evaaridjisfuentes)

She said that in the dream she was performing and that it felt powerful and strange because she hadn’t performed in fifteen years, and that in the dream-performance I was there with her. That’s when she said: let’s meet.

Around that time there were lots of internet sleuths looking for Q Lazzarus. She’d become a cult figure and a kind of myth. How did she feel about that when you met her?

She was upset by them. I mean, she didn’t have a computer, she didn’t have social media, she wasn’t really on the internet. [Q’s son] James told her there were people looking for her so she responded just to say she was alive and didn’t want to be found. But then this other person started pretending to be her, publishing tweets and stuff in her voice and that really upset her.

She had no plans to return to music or to the public eye, really, until I got into her car and we started the documentary. There was this idea around Q that she had bad timing. That she was “ahead” of her time, a rock and roll artist the world wasn’t ready for. And when the world was ready and handed her a chance, something would suddenly happen that changed her life’s course.

One of her old acquaintances had said there was an irony in her surname being Luckey. But I don’t know if I fully agree with that. She had an extraordinary life — enough experience for many lifetimes, which is why I chose the title. More to come, even. There was a time when I was thinking of getting a composer to do a score and then I was like: no, I only want to use her music. And if there’s a moment with just silence so be it. That’s what it was like in her lifetime. There was no music. She wasn’t making music, she wasn’t listening to music. Maybe it’s okay sometimes to not have music, you know?

This idea of overlooked talent, of Q finally getting deserved recognition after so much hardship, really got into people’s hearts at the festival. How do you hope audiences in Mexico will react to the film in particular?

Well, this is a music documentary in the sense that it’s about a singer and the music she made. There are parallels with “Searching for Sugarman,” for example. But I think it’s also about so many other themes: whether it’s a story of a mother and a son, of social justice, of heartbreak. I’ve had lots of young people responding to it and that’s exciting — that kids are hyped about a documentary instead of a big Hollywood feature with all the bells and whistles.

In the United States, it’s a bit different. It’s very much also the story of an African American woman who was affected by her race, from the music industry to the judicial system to the medical system. But in the end it’s just the story of an extraordinary woman and a talent that most people don’t know exists.That’s what I hope will land with anyone watching the film.

Bettine is from the Highlands of Scotland and now lives in Mexico City, working in film development at The Lift, Mexico’s leading independent audiovisual production company.

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Posting selfies in graveyards and second-hand bookshops in “Embra” — as he nicknamed Edinburgh, the country’s capital — what most captured my imagination was del Toro’s stream of posts about a haunted hotel room in my birthplace of Aberdeenshire.

Guillermo takes Scotland 

Del Toro, who claims he “always stays in the most haunted room,” revealed that despite “high hopes”, he has never yet encountered anything supernatural. This time, however, the 19th-century castle where he was staying — already abandoned by one producer for its “oppressive vibe” — seemed promising. 

Whilst del Toro fed his monster-loving audience with promises of discovering the “something’” lurking in the room, locals focused on catching a glimpse of “Frankenstein”’s star-studded cast, including Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac and the appropriately named Mia Goth. Trish, the manager of the local Post Office, became a minor social media sensation in her own right after demanding to see the sultry actor Charles Dance, saying: “I’ve asked for him to be sent here immediately!”

In the hypothetical Venn diagram comparing Mexico and Scotland, it seems right that a healthy slice of the crossover should be reserved for Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix adaptation of “Frankenstein.” While Mary Shelley’s iconic novel is set largely in Switzerland, its themes of resurrection and hubris feel at home in Scotland, where science and the macabre have long gone hand-in-hand. 

Ancestral callings may also be at play in this merging of influences: del Toro hinted that his sudden passion for Gaelic life could stem from Irish lineage on his mother’s side, and between two cultures that share important ‘threshold’ festivals — Mexico’s Día de los Muertos and Samhain, the Celtic precursor to Halloween — there’s fertile ground for the tale of a creature pacing the liminal space between this life and the next. 

Del Toro, who has described himself as a “death groupie” and spent over a decade trying to get this project off the ground, called “Frankenstein” a film he would “kill to make. The high priest of the ostracized, his supernatural societal rejects often remain as deeply human, as their ‘real’ counterparts.

In “Pan’s Labyrinth,” eleven-year-old Ofelia escapes the brutal reality of 1930s Francoist Spain through a sprawling kingdom under her house.  In “The Shape of Water,” mute janitor Elisa Esposito begins a romance with an amphibious creature imprisoned by the U.S. government in a Cold War-era Baltimore laboratory. 

Set against Mussolini’s interwar Italy, the idols we revere are brought down to scale in  “Pinocchio” as del Toro pushes the point that we should be ourselves to be recognized as valid for who we are. At one point the ostracized puppet, looking up at an effigy of Christ in a church, asks “He’s made of wood too. Why do they like him and not me?”. 

In del Toro’s uncanny modern-day worlds, overshadowed by authoritarian rule, the Other leaks into and swamps long-held rationale and institutional beliefs. His villains are often those who worship at the altar of man-made power structures, such as “The Shape of Water”’s Strickland, a square-jawed everyman who drives a Cadillac, or the Franco loyalists in “The Devil’s Backbone,” who are more concerned with finding a stash of gold hidden on the grounds of their orphanage rather than the ghost of a boy haunting the premises.

Victor Frankenstein, a scientist blinded by ego, constructs a creature who, like many of del Toro’s antiheroes, exists outside society’s understanding of what a real person should be. Del Toro views imperfection as “one of the most beautiful things,” and is said by his friend Alfonso Cuaron to bring his beloved characters close to the afterlife as a way of “bringing them peace”. 

For a filmmaker brought up under the sweltering sun of Guadalajara, del Toro has a chilled Celtic sensibility that, in “Frankenstein,” might fuse Mexico and Scotland’s twinned links with the afterlife. Like Victor Frankenstein, the director is a master of soaking up ideas from the undergrowth and breathing new life into them, resurrecting and reconstructing the outsider to be a distorted but no less realistic reflection of ourselves. 

Bettine is from the Highlands of Scotland and now lives in Mexico City, working in film development at The Lift, Mexico’s leading independent audiovisual production company.

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For a place often creatively sieved through a foreign lens, it’s unsurprising that art carves out elements of this vast and varied country and offers a distorted taste of Mexico. But screen entertainment, so easily consumed as an alternate version of reality, should perhaps be held more accountable for its portrayals. 

So how accurately is the foreigner-in-Mexico character depicted? Do we have the subtle expat equivalents of Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” or Wong Kar-wai’s “Happy Together”? Certain characters might have lodged in our minds like beloved, unbudgeable roommates, including the tequila-fuelled clowns of “The Three Amigos,” lovesick sirens a-la-”Night of the Iguana” and “Under the Volcano”-style doomed dreamers.  

With Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ “Queer” now primed for release, I’ve been contemplating lesser-known examples. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of films from the last decade in which Mexico is the loyal host, incomers are troublesome guests and the usual tropes have been disinvited, even if they occasionally gatecrash. 

Rotting in the Sun (2023, dir. Sebastián Silva) 

One to avoid watching with your great-aunt, pet parrot, or anybody who might accidentally relay what they saw at a lunch party, “Rotting in the Sun” sees director Sebastián Silva playing a barely fictionalized version of himself lounging around Mexico City with post-pandemic fatigue and a drug-fueled death wish. 

After accidentally rescuing real-life Instagram star Jordan Firstman in a “Baywatch”-style meet-cute in Zicatela, the much paler, more nihilistic protagonists return to the capital, where Jordan relentlessly pursues Sebastián to make him ‘actually famous’ by collaborating on a film. Black comedy morphs into a nudity-filled thriller as Sebastián vanishes, leaving Jordan to play the lead in his own detective noir,  assisted and obstructed by scenester friends, a nervous whippet and a paranoid maid. 

Savage and explicit, this is Lars Von Trier on a Hitchcockian odyssey loose pun intended). Go to the filming location in La Roma and you might just see the film’s extras wandering around with lattes in hand and dogs on leashes, calling their friends about existential dread. 

On MUBI, with a subscription. 

Sundown (2021, dir. Michel Franco) 

Flashing past with the dramatic subtlety of a sunset, “Sundown” is one of Mexican auteur Michel Franco’s best. Tim Roth, with blissful disassociation, plays Neil Bennet, a Brit whose holiday in Acapulco with his sister Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is disrupted by their mother’s death. Pretending to lose his passport to avoid returning to reality, Neil embraces inertia by joining those who, as Robert Frost described, “turn their back on the land.”

Migrating between grimy hotel room and grimy beach with lover Berenice, Neil stares at the ocean while Alice single-handedly manages their family fortune made in pig slaughterhouses. The drama is masterfully underscored by complex undercurrents as everyman Neil suffers the extraordinary, visceral effects of the lineage of traumas that founded his inheritance. Eerie and moving, “Sundown” is like that final hour on the beach, when tan and beer have morphed into burn and dread and evening has arrived far too soon. 

On Amazon Prime US, or with a Now subscription. 

Sundowners (2017, dir. Pavan Moondi) 

Discovered, admittedly, while searching for the last film, it’s maybe telling that this low-budget Canadian flick didn’t put Franco off his title choice nor threaten to knock shoulders with the 1960 Western of the same name. “Sundowners” follows thirty-something Alex, a down-and-out photographer sent to Mexico to shoot a wedding, who ropes in equally down-and-out friend Nick to pose as his assistant.

The film meanders as the men navigate the doomed wedding, doomed romances, doomed finances and a slightly doomed plot. But there is something curiously watchable about this indie, with its pretty handheld visuals, improvised dialogue and cast of non-actors. An off-kilter bromance becomes a warming Sunday night watch you don’t turn off, even if you realize halfway through you’ve got the wrong film. There’s something strange, though, about the Cancún-like setting and the taxi driver’s accent. This mystery is swiftly solved when a Google search reveals it was all filmed in Colombia. 

$5-9 on Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, YouTube and more. 

Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015, dir. Peter Greenaway) 

A film about filmmaking, another with unblinking nudity and — finally — one without the word “sun” in the title. Don’t let that put you off this wacky tale about the godfather of auteur filmmakers, Russian practitioner Sergei Eisenstein, attempting to make his ultimately abandoned 1930 revolution flick “Que Viva Mexico!” It’s got all the flamboyant, motor-mouth hallmarks of British director Peter Greenaway, which prove to be fitting bedfellows alongside Mexican surrealism and Russian zaniness.

Eisenstein, played by Elmer Bäck, is having his first love affair at the age of 33 in this paradisical country that has driven him wild with passion, having been shunned by Hollywood. The film doles out delicious dollops of 19th-century architecture, peering up at Porfirian buildings as though dropped into the middle of a birthday cake, making a great advert for Guanajuato, where the whole film was shot. Like its sometimes-forgotten protagonist, this is a film worth keeping in mind for its risk-taking eccentricity. 

$5.99 on Amazon Prime or with a BFI Player subscription. 

499 (2020, dir. Rodrigo Reyes) 

Very much a voyage across an unknown land, though whether seen through the eyes of a foreigner is  debatable. 500 years after the first Spaniard set foot on Yucatán’s shores, a 16th-century Spanish conquistador makes a pilgrimage through modern-day Mexico. He meets broken families of murdered activists, visits schools where children march uniformly, witnesses clandestine deals in clubs downtown and observes a damaged landscape.

As the blank-faced Spaniard, mustached and armor-clad, paces across the paradise his counterparts crossed half a millennium before, he absorbs the resentment and confusion of its living descendants. Half documentary, half fiction, Reyes infuses his film with beauty and anger in equal measure and plays with our understanding of time and trauma, debating whether the two can ever really be separately processed. 

$3-9 on Amazon Prime or Apple TV+, or with a Criterion Channel subscription. 

Bettine is from the Highlands of Scotland and now lives in Mexico City, working in film development at The Lift, Mexico’s leading independent audiovisual production company.

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