Is Luis Estrada The Conscience of Mexico?

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Mexican film director Luis Estrada, who produced the film "The Perfect Dictatorship," speaks during an interview with AFP on September 29, 2014 in Mexico City. The movie, which criticizes the Mexican political system, will be in theaters next October 16th. (Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images)

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MEXICO CITY--A Luis Estrada film is not a riddle to decipher. The themes from the famous Mexican director come blaring at you with their high-beams on, usually from the opening credits.

Within the first minutes of his most famous film, the 2010 drug-war indictment “Infierno” (Hell), the main character gets deported, held up at gunpoint, robbed by police, and falls in with gangsters who have taken over his hometown; and it ends with blood dripping down the corrupt mayor’s podium and over Mexico’s eagle-and-serpent national symbols. In his 2006 film “Un Mundo Maravilloso” (A Wonderful World), about social inequality and globalization, his peasant protagonist finds himself stuck on a window ledge high up on the fictional World Financial Center, literally locked out from Mexico’s modernizing economy.

But the black-comedy satires that Estrada deals in have a fearless quality that takes aim at Mexico’s political class, including the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (or PRI) and the corruption, impunity, and violence he sees as embedded within it. Over the past 15 years, since his 1999 film "La Ley de Herodes" (Herod’s Law) about an extortionist PRI mayor, Estrada has established himself as one of Mexico’s most incisive social and political critics.

Mexican film directors have been on an exceptional run in recent years. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, whose first feature film, "Amores Perros," was nominated for an Academy Award in 2000, came out with the well-received "Birdman" this year. The more fantastically minded Guillermo Del Toro has directed movies such as "Hellboy" and "Pan’s Labyrinth." Last year, Alfonso Cuaron became the first Mexican to win the Oscar for best director for his film, "Gravity."

As those three have won fame in Hollywood, Estrada has kept his focus on his home country. He describes himself as passionate about information, “to levels a bit pathological,” reading up to five newspapers a day “to try to understand what is happening in this country and above all because I’m worried about where it’s going.”

This year, with "La Dictadura Perfecta" (The Perfect Dictatorship), he took on the presidency and the Mexican media. Estrada and his co-writer Jaime Sampietro came up with the film before Enrique Peña Nieto became president—bringing the PRI back to power after a 12-year hiatus—but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t about the man or the party. As the film declares: “In this story all the names are fictitious, the events suspiciously real. Any similarity with reality is not mere coincidence.”

The Mexican television giant, Televisa, had been a partner on the film, but then pulled out once executives saw it, and Estrada had to pay back the investment. Failing to find other backers, he partnered with a small art-film distributor. A company that was supposed to advertise the film on buses pulled out just before the launch.

But more than 4 million people have watched the trailer online and, despite the unconventional release, it went on to be the highest grossing Mexican film of the year and the third highest of all time. The film depicts a corrupt governor in cahoots with the mafia whose image is rehabilitated by a Mexican television network. The flattering coverage, including coupling him with one of their beautiful actresses, carries him to the presidency. (Peña Nieto, a telegenic former governor of Mexico State, also married a telenovela star.)

It has been a difficult stretch for Peña Nieto, who started his term trying to move the national narrative away from the drug war and towards his agenda of economic reforms, including opening up the country’s oil sector to foreign investment for the first time in decades. But the year ended with a slew of familiar problems. The disappearance of 43 teachers college students in Guerrero—allegedly at the hands of a local mayor and police aligned with a drug cartel—sparked months of nationwide protests and upheaval. At the same time it was revealed both the first lady and the finance minister bought homes from a favored contractor from Peña Nieto’s time as governor.

As another tumultuous year in Mexico comes to a close, we sat down with Luis Estrada to talk politics and filmmaking.

On the climate in Mexico for critical films

"Now it’s easier [to criticize the government], but not because of a desire or a political will of the government. It’s very interesting the way communication has changed in the past 15 years. If I use, as a reference, 'Herod’s Law,' compared with what has now occurred with 'The Perfect Dictatorship,' I think that the desire remains [by the government] to prevent showing a critical movie, a satire, with very clear references to institutions and people. It’s a curious thing: 'Herod’s Law' was the first film in the history of Mexican cinema that spoke about the PRI and the corruption and impunity that surrounded its reign for 70 years. 'The Perfect Dictatorship' is the first film in the history of Mexican cinema that satirizes the president. This sounds weird. Because in any real democracy—and we’ll talk about whether this country is a really a dictatorship or a democracy or what—this is something common, every day. If you are in the U.S., satires like 'Saturday Night Live,' or 'Family Guy,' or 'South Park,' are normal. In Mexico, as a product of its authoritarian tradition, for many decades, effectively, there was a clear censorship by the government."

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"Before 'The Perfect Dictatorship' came out, I began to notice again a certain authoritarian intention to keep the film from being seen. I also discovered something else, that the world had changed a lot in those 15 years, in particular the power today of the Internet, the social networks....I’m not much in favor of globalization, but one of the few good and interesting things that globalization has given the world is that acts of authoritarianism are harder to keep silent. To exercise this control over what you can say, what you can’t say, what you can show. Therefore I feel that the great difference--rather than some great democratic awakening by the government--has more to do with society and the media, social media, that has changed the way people communicate about abuses of power."

On the genesis of "The Perfect Dictatorship"

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