05 · 29 · 25

Sundance Film Festival CDMX 2025: ABEL, HEROD'S LAW and more

Rafael Aviña

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (dir. George Roy Hill, 1969) was a turning point in the film career of the then new actor Robert Redford; it was such a great appreciation for his role as Sundance that, years later, an independent film festival located in Park City, Utah, and headed by Redford himself, was baptized with the same name. The event was inaugurated in 1978 as the U. S. Film Festival of Utah, using Redford's image, and in 1981, the actor founded the Sundance Institute, months after triumphing at the Oscars with Ordinary People, in his directorial debut in 1980. By 1985, that Institute created the Sundance Film Festival, which began operations under that name in 1991.

Sundance marked a dividing line between big studio productions and independent and low-budget cinema, in an event of great global impact that would feature films such as: Blood Simple, by the Coen brothers; Stranger than Paradise, by Jim Jarmusch; Buffalo '66, by Vincent Gallo; The Blair Witch Project, by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez; Reservoir Dogs, by Quentin Tarantino; Sex, Lies and Videotape, by Steven Soderbergh; Strawberry and Chocolate, by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío; Central Station, by Walter Salles; or In the Hole, by Juan Carlos Rulfo, among many others.

For this reason, it is extremely attractive to attend the second edition of the Sundance Film Festival CDMX 2025, in alliance with Cinépolis, to be held in its complexes: Diana, Mitikah, Oasis Coyoacán and Carso, starting today, May 29 and ending June 1. 

In addition to some panel discussions with filmmakers and the screening of outstanding documentaries such as the Ukrainian 2000 meters to Andriivka, about the ravages of the war between Russia and Ukraine; the British One to One: John & Yoko, about the love story that the couple lived at the beginning of the seventies and the impact of television at the time; or the US documentary Selena y los Dinos, in which the filmmaker had access to unpublished materials from the Quintanilla family to create another portrait of the tragically deceased queen of Tex Mex, and several fiction films, the event recovers two iconic Mexican films: Herod's Law (1999), by Luis Estrada, and Abel (2010), by Diego Luna.

In an unexpected turn of events, the end of the century brought with it not only a recovery for Mexican cinema, as shown in Herod's Law, which managed to break the barriers of self-censorship with a ruthless, agile, brilliant, funny and well-acted satire, determined to show the madness of power and the corruption of the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party], the opposition and the complicit institutions that supported it. The film is based on an ingenious script by Jaime Sampietro, Fernando León, the director himself and Vicente Leñero, whose experience, irony and knowledge of the political reality were decisive in the final treatment.

The story of Juan Vargas (Damián Alcázar), a cowardly PRI militant chosen to occupy the temporary municipal presidency of a small town in 1949, served as a pretext for Estrada to explore the lost towns shown by Emilio Fernández in Hidden River or Roberto Gavaldón in Rosauro Castro, in an era that marked the beginning of corruption among public servants and the interference of foreign companies. An era of “peace, modernity and social justice” that is resolved under the protection of the Constitution and violence (“O te chingas o te jodes”) and the fact is that Herod's Law was a film that was needed in a film industry that was emerging at the end of the millennium.

On the other hand, in his feature film debut, Diego Luna focused on a modest, effective and ironic portrait of a family from which many complex topics (autism, parental abandonment, childhood traumas) arise that demanded greater depth. However, supported by good acting, an effective script by the director himself and Augusto Mendoza —responsible for the underappreciated Espinas (2005)—, Luna creates a gentle tone film that oscillates between biting humor and everyday drama, far from the crude formulas of melodrama.

It is an acid fable about the family in Mexico, with fathers dedicated only to providing and mothers who become pillars of the home, but who have little or no understanding of their children's inner worlds. Abel, a ten-year-old boy with a teenage sister and a younger brother, leaves the psychiatric hospital where he has been confined and returns home to end up taking on the role of the absent parent, in a film that ends with a realistic and anti-complacent climax.

Translated by Adrik Díaz