Katia Andrea Morales Gaitán, programmer and researcher at the Laboratoire CinéMédias, has selected seven films available for free on the ARTS.FILM platform throughout November, thanks to a collaboration with the Instituto Cultural de México / Espacio México Montréal and the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA).

Focus México: Correspondences Between Art and Film

Available for free on ARTS.FILM from October 31 to November 30, 2025

Throughout November, the collection Focus Mexico: Correspondences Between Art and Cinema, presented on the ARTS.FILM platform, invites Canadian audiences to freely discover seven films that explore Mexican imaginaries at the intersection of art and cinema. The program offers a journey through works addressing creative processes, gender, memory, intangible heritage, and the financialization of art.

Art, in its many forms—from painting to music, theater to architecture, with cinema as a unifying axis—captures the echoes of our pre-Hispanic heritage and the plural identities that shape contemporary Mexico. These artistic expressions also function as tools for critical reflection. Through creative practice, art and cinema redefine the very essence of our culture—conceived in this series as a living fabric of hybridities, memories, and aesthetic and political questions.

Nicolás Pereda has blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality in his work, establishing himself as one of the most authentic voices in contemporary auteur cinema. Bruno Bancalari invites us to listen to the Afro-Mexican voices of the Pacific coast, while Pablo Martínez Zárate reflects on the role of art in a world saturated with images. Olivia Peregrino and Ali Ray revisit the figures of Nancy Cárdenas and Frida Kahlo, two women whose lives and work defied the limits imposed by patriarchal control and the regimes of their time. Finally, Jill Magid explores the tension between cultural heritage and corporate commodification, questioning the boundaries between private property and access to the architectural archive of Luis Barragán.

Together, these seven films create a space of audiovisual resistance against the homogenizing effects of major digital platforms. Much remains to be done to ensure that artistic creation is not reduced to a transnational commodity. This program thus stands as a political act and a reappropriation of the cultural and artistic memory rooted in the territory once named by the Aztecs “the navel of the moon”—today known as Mexico.

— Katia Andrea Morales Gaitán
Guest Curator

Origin of the Project

The Focus Mexico was born out of exchanges between the programming team of the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA)—the organization behind ARTS.FILM—and Remigio Valdés de Hoyos, director of the Instituto Cultural de México / Espacio México Montréal. The Laboratoire CinéMédias and cinEXmedia later joined the project, enabling the participation of Katia Andrea Morales Gaitán as guest curator.

Founded by René Rozon, the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) is dedicated to promoting and showcasing films on art and media arts worldwide. For over four decades, it has hosted an annual event every March featuring the latest art documentaries, along with selections of interactive and virtual reality works. With programming and related activities presented year-round through an extensive cultural and educational network, FIFA is committed to fostering public knowledge and appreciation of art, promoting the work of artists active in film, video, and visual arts, and encouraging the production and distribution of films about art.

In 2021, FIFA launched ARTS.FILM, a virtual art center that makes films about art accessible across Canada—anywhere, anytime, all year round.