"Amores perros" moves Cannes 25 years after its premiere

Twenty-five years after its debut, the film "Amores perros" returned to the Cannes Film Festival —the same venue where it was first presented—for a commemorative anniversary screening.

The screening took place in the Agnès Varda Room and was attended by director Alejandro González Iñárritu and actor Gael García Bernal, who starred in the film.

The encounter with the audience was deeply moving, especially at the end of the screening, when Gael took the microphone and, despite having promised not to get emotional, couldn't help it: "Thank you Alejandro, you changed my life!" he said before hugging the filmmaker.

Iñárritu, for his part, reminded everyone who made this film possible, which, as the artistic delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, Thierry Frémaux, stated, "has already become a classic not only in Mexico, but around the world!"

The version presented was a restoration by Iñárritu and director of photography Rodrigo Prieto , with a new sound mix by Martín Hernández. "The idea is for people to be able to see it just as it was seen in 2000," the director explained.

Like any visionary, for the director, the most important thing about celebrating the past is catapulting it into the present and continuing to reinvent it.

That's why, in these first 25 years, he found the opportunity to renew the "Amores Perros" experience with a series of new projects that will extend the film's life beyond the cinema.

Among these is an installation with previously unseen material in several cities around the world.

"When we filmed it, we had a million feet of footage shot. The film lasts 2 hours and 34 minutes (16,500 feet), but the other 985,000 were stored at UNAM. In 2019, when we were about to turn 20, I wanted to do something, but the pandemic hit. Now I've been extracting material for six years, and I'm going to do an installation that will be at the Prada Foundation in Milan, at LagoAlgo in Mexico City, and in Los Angeles."

In addition, Iñárritu revealed that the film will have a re-release in movie theaters, which will take place between September and October of this year .

"There's going to be a theatrical re-release of the film in Latin America and around the world. People will be able to see it again in theaters," he enthused. Additionally, a book will be published, "a beautiful, global edition with MACK Books," he concluded.

YC