Morelia Film Festival Screens 1980S Mexican Popular Cinema Films
Ratas de la ciudad opens with children emerging from drainage pipes to murder a young man for his belongings, anchoring a screening cycle that highlights Mexican popular cinema of the 1980s.
Four emblematic films from that decade have been recovered for a brief screening program running between November 5 and November 15, 2026, programmed by researcher Karina Solórzano as part of FICUNAM 2026.
Directed, produced, and starring Valentín Trujillo, the 1984 feature mixes sensationalist urban crime reporting with social commentary on juvenile delinquency. The narrative follows a father searching for his son who descends into a criminal underworld marked by police corruption and organized crime, featuring a cast that includes Rodolfo de Anda, Humberto Elizondo, Roberto Flaco Guzmán, and Angélica Chain, alongside a theme song composed and performed by Armando Manzanero.
The film was shot in locations that included the defunct Reino Aventura, La Lagunilla, Portales, Tepito, and the viewpoint on the highway to Cuernavaca.
The film opens with paranoid imagery of street children controlled by street gangs, operating on raw instincts forged by poverty, neglect, and abuse. This focus on marginalized youth mirrors independent contemporary projects such as Paul Leduc’s ¿Cómo ves? and Arturo Velazco’s La banda de Los Panchitos, both filmed in 1985.
The retrospective also features José Luis García Agraz’s 1982 film Nocaut, which captures film noir atmospheres using flashbacks to follow a boxer overwhelmed by a violent city, featuring a performance by Gonzalo Vega.
One of the standout scenes features Vega’s encounter with a taxi driver played by Alejandro Parodi; both Parodi and director García Agraz won Ariel and Diosa de Plata awards for Best First Work and Best Co-acting. That film screens on Sunday, November 15 at 11:30 hours at the Centro Cultural Universitario.
Alberto Cortés’s El amor a la vuelta de la esquina, which won the 1985 Experimental Cinema Contest, stars Gabriela Roel and Alonso Echánove in a story adapted from an Albertine Sarrazin novel.
The extraordinary leading pair functioned as magnets of passion and eroticism in a story written by the director himself and writer José Agustín, which also featured Martha Papadimitrou, a friend of Roel, and Pilar Pellicer as a violent brothel madam. That work is scheduled for exhibition on Sunday, November 15 at 16:00 hours at the reopened Sala Fósforo.
Claudio Isaac’s 1982 feature El día que murió Pedro Infante rounds out the program with a low-budget exploration of an artist’s crisis, starring Humberto Zurita alongside Delia Casanova, Luz María Jerez, Chela Braniff, Cristina Baker, and Leticia Perdigón.
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