A certain tendency of the Mexican cinema
I also make films—I’m not a film critic—and I’ll speak to you about friends and only about what excites me in their work. With that arbitrariness out of the way, I’ll tell you I met them about ten years ago in Monterrey, where I live with Pablo Chavarría and Alexandro Aldrete, who is also from here (though he may be in Mexico City while I write). Diego Moreno is from Chiapas—he came here to study film, then taught, and I met him through a friend who wanted to talk to me about Deleuze—or was it Bergson? I don’t remember. He introduced me to Pablo back in 2012 when I had a project to make a short film every day. When Pablo Chavarría came to my house, we went into the woods like children and filmed what we found there. I met Alex Aldrete when we all got together in a place to drink and start a sort of production company—which was really just an excuse to talk about film, not only to make it and help each other. We called it Sierra Madre Oriental. Sometimes there were more people involved—like Aarón Ratz, Andrés Luna, Luis Garza. Maybe this text needs a second part to talk about everyone; for now, I’ll focus on these three friends who make films despite everything and share such a singular vision. In my voice, I’ll try to emulate each of their styles.
I’m going to loosen my belt, let that belly come out—the one that’s always been a symbol of love. I’ll start with Alexandro Aldrete—he’s the tallest and the shortest, but he always walks tall; his back is broad and he looks like he just got off a horse, wearing spurs. He likes to carry the baton in conversation; his tone is raw and shameless like a ficheras film—charming despite its roughness. Aldrete is a cinema rider, his horse wild yet tame at heart—like John Waters, he can be both a provocateur and a gentleman. At the end of the day, Alex is also an actor, a persona who leaves his mark on everything he does, with an innate grasp of cinema’s language from his first feature-length work, in which he wrote, directed, starred, and edited. He’s a comedian who looks inward, who isn’t afraid to laugh at the darkest parts of himself, someone who knows how to reclaim shame as a moment of wisdom. At the start of his first film, Oliendo a perro, his philosophy is clear even during the opening credits: Alex plays Tavo, and his friend Horacio is played by David Colorado, who has regrets about sleeping with his best friend. But Tavo’s advice is practical and straightforward: “No hay que hacerla de pedo, hay que lidiar con estas pinches mamadas como adultos.” Horacio replies, “You’re a sage.” Tavo responds, “No, dude—we’re sharing, we’re sharing knowledge here, that’s all.” That’s exactly the kind of thing Alex would say. It’s as if he made his first film to shed that last drop of shame—it’s provocative, moving, unforgettable, yet the “pinche dignidad” remains intact. Like a drunken Harmony Korine trying to kiss a bisexual dwarf in Gummo, Aldrete has no fear of getting his hands dirty; he prioritizes speaking candidly, up front. Of course, we’re talking about an alter ego, like how Larry David embodies misanthropy through his alter ego in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In Oliendo a perro, each character is also an actor—Tavo and Horacio are constantly breaking, showing vulnerability, then donning masks of power and strength. The fantastic scene where Horacio alternates between tenderly comforting Tavo and disciplining him like a ranchero is a testament to how original his direction of actors is, particularly the work of David Colorado, alongside a script that truly understands that wit lives in the rhythm of words.
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In his latest film, Mañana Psicotrópica, Aldrete doesn’t act, and I think you can sense it in the tone—it’s so subtle that some viewers might miss it if they don’t know who’s behind it. Yet his presence remains, just like in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The plot is simple: a group of kids who smoke weed throw a party and take psychedelics, which spark a positive catharsis for one of them. Since the tension isn’t in the plot, it shifts into details, gestures, glances, things said without thinking. It’s a meticulous observation of a real and present generation, where we can read traces of Mexico’s struggles—but in an indirect way, kind of numbed by the weed. The country is in ruins, but I’m still feeling chill. You can’t avoid that subtle irony, but this film’s experience is very different—its characters aren’t caricatures; we can’t pretend to know them, because they’re as complex as we are, the viewers—us, getting high and chilling until a bullet hits. Why not? Above all, the film is affirmative: ride your wave, inject yourself, enjoy it. And yes, even if nothing truly bad happens during this journey, it’s a pleasure, a happiness—because we know it’s not always like that. In that sense, this film has more impact than a typical violent story. Here, it’s our Mexican imagination that injects fear—waiting for a kidnapping around the corner. But nothing happens, and we’re left with our own ridiculous fear and maybe even a bad trip from paranoia and poor communication. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Maybe some of us need that kind of trip—one that makes your heart rise to your throat and drown you; to cry, to regret, to admit we’re idiots, to accept our scars, to loosen up—and then—almost by magic—the landscape clears.
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Right in the middle of Mañana Psicotrópica, the title appears, and then we see the group eating mushrooms in a forest on a morning. This leads Lito (the best choice for protagonist) to a catharsis that includes a group hug, with everyone saying sweet things to each other. There’s no external conflict—only a catharsis for a conflict we don’t witness directly, one hinted at by scars on their arms. We’re spared the doom, and the real emotion at play in this scene (and much of the film) is shame—and this connects back to his first film, Oliendo a perro. The focus isn’t only on the characters’ shame—sometimes for others, sometimes for themselves—but on the shame the audience feels when characters confront uncomfortable emotions.
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Mañana Psicotrópica also reminds me of Terrence Davies’s The Long Day Closes, where each scene evades conflict, maintaining a facade of calm even as a deep anxiety simmers beneath the surface. But talking with Aldrete, another reference came up: Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, which impressed him by its lack of conflict—even while remaining captivating every second. This subversion of traditional narrative is done with great respect—he’s not trying to alienate or distance the audience, and he doesn’t. The spectator holds an important place in his cinema and appreciates the time he gives. If he explores different narrative structures, it’s because he believes the audience is ready for it.
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Recently, he made a documentary with Diego Enrique Osorno about La Muñeca Tetona—examining a photograph that starts with something absurd (a doll) and ends up revealing a connection between the intellectuals of the ‘80s and Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Sacar la neta de la gente—something Aldrete loves—just like shining light on events that deserve more attention, as in the short documentary Territorio Común, which records indigenous communities’ struggle for land.
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When Pablo talks about film, he speaks with the excitement of a child, even as he uses jargon coined by film philosophers. He says everything close to his face, almost shouting—especially when he’s had a few drinks. His mind is restless and inquisitive, and if he has a chance to protest something, he’ll do it. That’s his cinema: revolutionary, always evolving, embracing the experience of pushing to extremes.
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From his first short, Cynomys, he seemed to grasp the fundamentals of editing—within twelve minutes he packed a wealth of visual and auditory information. Three years later, in Tapetum Lucidum, there’s a twelve-minute shot of Pablo following actress Mónica through the streets of a town in Guanajuato. The formal transformation is radical, with an underlying concept of time that is distinct. It didn’t come automatically—there’s a continuous exploration of cinematic language, a mutation even within the same film. Terrafeni, his first feature, premiered at FICM in 2012 when he was 26: it begins with handheld shots worthy of the Dardenne brothers, moves through panoramic and fixed desert shots, and closes with poetic underwater takes. I feel like his films always aim to begin from zero, each time with new perspective and language. What remains constant is that revolutionary vision that infuses his words, music, and laughter.
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With every film, he comes closer to an idea I once heard in a Hou Hsiao‑hsien documentary: treating each shot as a film in itself. Pablo Chavarría has that distinctive signature—each shot is a small universe, not just a change in angle but a shift in perspective. Perhaps that’s why his narratives become more abstract, even Cubist. In his latest feature, Las Letras, this is clearer: scenes shift from a dance to a river to a Chiapanecan family to fruit to murdered police officers. But it’s not only the radical scene changes—it’s that each shot is autonomous. For example, one shot of a woman running toward a wall repeats several times in a row. More than a rhythmic effect, it feels like you’re trapped in time—as if the shot refuses to end, refusing to let angle changes or sequence matter, giving weight to the whole encapsulated in that “shot.” It’s not serialism. As a biologist and Deleuze reader, the term that suits him better is “rhizomatic,” and his shots are like plateaus. In his film Alexfilm, almost everything happens in one room with a single character. Rather than advancing time, each scene becomes an experiment in cinematic language. Though sometimes shots seem to overlap and form continuity, at other moments something shifts in the flow, reminding us continuity never existed—or at least isn’t the point. This allows tremendous creativity in editing, letting him arrange shots in the order that best suits his ideas and rhythm.
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In less than four years, he’s made six features and several shorts. He’s always working or planning his next project—money hasn’t stopped him. He was born in Monterrey, but his movies are mostly set in Chiapas, where he lives now. The nature of those places is constant throughout his films, and he has a special affinity for animals—reflecting his perspective as a biologist. Since his first film, Terrafeni, he’s used wild animals to express his characters’ latent emotions. But I can’t define a single usage of animals across his films—the truth is, in each one they respond to different expressions. In the short, Un año, Pablo uses bird sounds toward the end, producing a small miracle—like hearing them for the first time, as the baby he portrays would. Or the dog that seems to be dreaming in Tapetum Lucidum, which even serves as the film’s trailer: becomes a symbolic shot. I just thought—maybe the whole film is the dog’s dream. Well, perhaps absurd—but every scene has its own gravity, capable of pivoting the entire film into its own axis to justify itself. His films have many central axes—again I lean on Deleuze to call his cinema “rhizomatic.”
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Music and dance are another recurring theme in his filmography. In Tapetum Lucidum, not only does Mónica dance, but children and adults dance in the plaza. In El Resto del Mundo a girl dances at the start, and later a woman sings. In Las Letras a woman dances in a forest and a man plays the drums. Pablo Chavarría also plays drums—so he’s always aware of rhythm. It seems the strongest link between shots is rhythmic; the tension within them is guided by rhythm. In his latest film, Fragmentos en la vida de un músico, released this year just as the plague began—and probably at one of the last in-person festivals, FICUNAM—it’s a (musical?) comedy. I’d say: together but not mixed. In other words: abstract/rhythmic meditations and mostly absurd and comic situations anchoring a personal story, one that becomes meta; that’s why his films are more like music than literature.
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Diego Amando Moreno Garza is the literary one. In his home, everyone has their own—and massive—library. Diego is the one who brought us together: he introduced himself to me, then introduced me to the others, and together we ended up forming the group called Sierra Madre Oriental. During all that time I thought Diego was the oldest—his knowledge seemed to demand time spent reading. But no—he’s the youngest of us all. His gaze and smile signal someone who knows so much, someone who loves to converse. His face reminds me of the mask from V for Vendetta, and there’s something of that character in him too. I know his reading is eclectic—science, alchemy, psychology, contemporary and classic novels—a bit of everything. His curiosity is insatiable.
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Since he moved from Chiapas to Monterrey to study film, he began making shorts and features that, from the start, carried a distinctive aesthetic: dark, textured, extrasensory. In one of his earliest shorts, Las campanas deben de sonar por siempre, it seems to be a documentary (I doubt Diego ever filmed a “real” documentary) about an elderly man whose daily ritual is ringing church bells at noon. In Antún Kojtom, in which he documents a graphic artist, the focus is more on atmospheric sound and abstraction of detail through close-ups. He’s done similar work filming musicians. Like Chavarría and Aldrete, he’s interested in rhythm—but expresses it differently—and I’ll go ahead and say: in his latest film, rhythm is everything.
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He was 26 when he finished Nosotros, Lucifer in 2013. The film runs about an hour (most of his features do). Inside, there’s a balance between youth talking about their love lives and a study of bodies, textures, and dissolutions. Sometimes four or more images overlap, letting us feel the multiple dimensions of the story. Other times visuals are entirely abstract—like walking through fibers dyed in color. Terror is always present, largely in sound—ranging from somnambulant drones to sudden static jolts like knives at the eardrum. Other times, terror lies in black-and-white, in places and compositions that remind me of Murnau.
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In Diego Moreno’s films, mind and body are in secret communication—probably alchemical. But as opposed to Cronenberg, who also finds terror in body-mind fusion, in Moreno the body reigns, and the mind-body difference is digital rather than analog—more schizoid, less symptomatic. In his latest film, Tres respuestas a Anton Reiser, the harshest cuts are to shots of a computer searching for a DOS file that can’t be found—this reminded me of the static that haunted his feature Exergo. Rhythm is essential here—to the point a recurring image is a metronome ticking rhythmically, precise like a musician. As speed increases, the digital seems to dissolve, giving the impression of uniformity across displaced spaces and times. Terror becomes musicalized—I can still feel it even when it’s absent, as though consumed in the interstices.
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His preference for horizontal framing—like lenses with anamorphic or CinemaScope-like proportions—gives his compositions elegance and calm. Combined with his fondness for close-ups, they evoke a triptych or an open art book—something to be read, pushing the eye to nervously traverse the corners of the frame, trying to make sense of fragments that appear and move in the dark. The same goes for his dialogue and narration—they’re fragments of daily life, with dark and bright parts, like a rusted knife. Unlike CinemaScope’s use in epic tales, here the epic happens at the cutaneous level; glorious, narrative music becomes whispers and cosmic vibrations—like previously inaudible flesh weavings.
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In Exergo, another so-called documentary, we hear chilling recordings of a woman who decided to kill her children. The woman’s schizophrenic language overflows both narrative and image—like in Antonioni’s Red Desert, where the film consumes itself within a woman’s perspective as she goes mad. The schizoid jumps between mundane observations and dark philosophies in her dialogue echo the banal activities we see her perform, alongside the intellectual complexity of her words, structuring the film.
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In his latest film, titled Tres respuestas a Anton Reiser, Diego Moreno celebrates what I know to be the most sophisticated union of music and editing I’ve seen. From a metric foundation to shifts in rhythm and tone—worthy of Eisenstein’s theory. Counterpoint is explored through multiple metaphorical layers, both of ideas and bodies. “It is the dead who have the Voice,” the narrator says—and it resonates for me, not only in this latest film, but throughout much of Diego’s work, including his latest short, Ensayo, which blends music and literature perfectly. It is cinema of thoughts and phantom bodies that refuse to disappear—returning to make the bells ring again.
I thought I would write at length, analyzing every detail of every film by Diego, Pablo, and Alexandro—but each time I started, I lost interest in writing. It felt like forcing a puzzle piece into place. I might grasp details, but not the whole. I use these words solely to spark curiosity in them—so after reading this, they’ll seek out their videos online, let the discovery come from their own experience—and spread the word if they enjoy it.
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Diego Amando Moreno:
Pablo Chavarría:
https://www.youtube.com/@pchavarriagtz
Alexandro Aldrete:
https://www.youtube.com/@aldreteaurora
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