Netflix movie “The Son-In-Law,” from James Schamus and the Larraín brothers heads a talent-packed 2026 Guadalajara Fest Mexico Mezcal Competition squarely focused on urgent social issues plaguing Mexico and beyond.
“I see a stronger, more unapologetic focus on social cinema than in previous years,” Estrella Araiza, director of the Guadalajara Film Festival (FICG) has told Variety.
Helmed by “Miss Bala” director Gerardo Naranjo, “The Son-in-Law” is joined by other potential Mezcal standouts such as “Oca” from “Roma” producer Pimienta Films and the latest movies from maverick J.M. Cravioto and auteur Kenya Márquez.
Co-written and produced by Schamus, teaming for production with the Mexico office of Pablo and Juan de Dios Larraín’s Fabula, “The Son-in-Law” world premieres at Guadalajara on April 18, before dropping on Netflix May 1.
In it, the characters’ “great Mexican dream” – of making it at any cost – becomes “a rather insane, absurd tragicomedy,” said Schamus.
“Oca,” from the Nicolas Celis-led Pimienta Films, also behind Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” Tatiana Huezo’s “Prayers for the Stolen” and Amat Escalante’s “Lost in the Night,” is “from the absurd, a biting reflection on faith in a fractured society,” producer María José Córdova tells Variety. It won the Zonacine Audience Award at Spain’s Málaga Festival this March.
A fiction tribute to legendary crime photographer Enrique Metinides, Mezcal entry “City of the Dead” reps another potentially distinctive film from Cravioto (“A Deadly Invitation,” “Wheels, Weed & Rock n’ Roll”), also a director on episodes in “Berlin.”
Mezcal contender “Missing” marks the fourth feature from Kenya Márquez, winner of the First Feature Award at the 2012 Miami Festival with “Fecha de Caducidad.” It is co-written with distinguished Argentine filmmaker Celina Murga, director most recently of the Martin Scorsese-exec produced infidelity thriller “The Freshly Cut Grass.”
Guadalajara’s Mezcal Mexico Competition promises breakouts, however, given other titles such as “Celestino” and nearly all the doc-features are some kind of directorial debut.
Notable among doc features are two which chart personal and collective civic reaction to two impossibly forgettable cases of feminicide in a country where, according to the United Nations, cited by the makers of “Querida Fátima,” 10 women or girls are murdered every day.
Doc feature “The Same Blood,” for instance, aims at creating solid protection mechanisms for human rights defenders in Mexico. A social impact strategy will kick off with a May 28 event in Chilpancingo, attended by all Guerrero state deputies.
A closer look at titles:
Fiction Features
“Celestino,” (Hans Bryssinck, SPIN, Belgium, Mexico)
Iván, a Belgium journalist, tries to track down elusive writer Célestino Pérez, who is nowhere to be found in the town where he’s said to live. But his family takes Iván in as his experiences begin to dissolve into the imagined portrait of Celestino. “Rather than constructing a mystery to be solved, I sought to allow multiple interpretations and maintain uncertainty until after the film ends,” says Bryssinck (“Wilson y Los Más Elegantes”).
‘Celestino’
“City of the Dead,” (“Ciudad de los Muertos,” J.M. Cravioto, Peninsula Films & Entertainment, Cinemex Distribución, Alebrije Producciones, México)
When a body is found in a suitcase, Enrique, a renowned forensic photographer, finds himself caught up in a secret agent’s hunt for a serial killer. Blending police and detective movies with film noir, “my intention was to create a ‘parapsychological’ thriller featuring silver nitrate ghosts as a heartfelt tribute to photography, 20th-century urban chroniclers and Mexican cinema,” Cravioto tells Variety. Produced by Eduardo Díaz Casanova’s Península, behind Netflix titles “No One Saw Us Leave” and “The Guardian of the Monarchs.”
‘City of the Dead’
Eduardo Cisneros
“Missing,” (Kenya Márquez, Puerco Rosa Producciones, Rubicon Productions, Mexico)
René, a lonely, insecure, and rebellious teenager, tries to flee her suffocating parents and multiple doubts making a 1,200-mile journey to Ciudad Juárez, where she senses something calling her. It will prove a revelatory inner journey. “An exploration of a search on different levels: Sexual identity, the sense of family and a collapsed country, made from the point of view of an adolescent,” Márquez tells Variety.
“Oca,” (Karla Badillo, Pimienta Films, Pina Films, Las Jaras)
The feature debut as a director of producer Badillo, a production partner on Lisandro Alonso’s “Eureka.” Described as a satirical and spiritual film, it turns on Rafaela, a young nun in an almost extinct order dispatched to the local village to find the new archbishop. Along the way, she experiences extraordinary encounters which make her advance or retreat on her path, “wealth and poverty, corruption and duty and the human and the divine precisely colliding,” says producer Córdova.
‘Oca’
“The Rest is Memory,” (“Lo que nos van dejando,” Issa García Ascot, Cortes Finos, Mexico)
Travelling to the jungle to a research center, Sara, 30, uncovers forgotten events from her past “and parts of herself she never knew, leading to a revelation — and the freedom she longed for but never thought possible.” “An attempt to materialize a series of events and sensations that changed my life and the way I inhabit it,” says García Ascot. From Cortes Finos, founded in 2016 by editor Yibrán Asuad (“A Cop Movie,” “La Cocina”).
“The Son-In-Law,” (Gerardo Naranjo, Netflix, Fábula)
José Sánchez, sporting a magnificent touche, unthinking ambition and the gift of the gab, is transformed by chance into El Serpiente, a ruthless political strategist.” “The Son-in-Law” “explores betrayal, portraying it as a widespread practice in this country” and a “provocation, inviting us to examine a reality that is equally ridiculous and contradictory,” Naranjo said. “Only through the experience of watching it will its full meaning be revealed,” promised Netflix Content VP Francisco Ramos.
Doc-Features
“The Kid in the Photo. Carlos Saura,” (Anna Saura, Atrece Creaciones, Gonita Filmación, Mostra Cinema)
Daughter Anna Saura delivers an intimate, knowing and humor-sluiced portrait of what made great Spanish director Carlos Saura tick, his lifelong horrors and how he was with family and friends, weaving often playful informal interview and occasional archive footage simply catching Saura at work at his mountain home. “A close-up, emotional work where I invite the spectator t0 discover his most human side,” Anna Saura tells Variety.
Carlos Saura / The Kid in the Photo
“Mickey,” (Dano García, Venado Films, Phototaxia Pictures, Estudio Errante, Mexico)
A 2026 SXSW Visions Audience Award winner, shot over 10 years braiding interview, play and performance, with animation and green screen scenes as Mickey Cundapi, a trans woman in died-in-the-wool Sinaloa, remembers the last 10 years of her life. Trans films allow the “possibility of telling a non-punitive story, full of humor and resilience,” says García. From Venado, also behind “Los reyes del pueblo que no existe,” a 2015 SXSW Global Audience Award winner.
‘Mickey’
“Querida Fátima,” (Lorena Gutiérrez Rangel, Su Kim, Jesús Quintana Vega, Rodrigo Reyes, Dawn Valadez, Mexico, U.S.)
A decade after the brutal murder of her daughter Fátima at the age of 12, mother Lorena Gutiérrez travels to the National Palace, demanding an audience with Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Directed by a collective led by Gutiérrez and described as a “visceral portrait combing personal pain and political resistance.”
“Our Body Is an Expanding Star,” (Tania Hernández Velasco, Semillites Hernández Velasco, Autonauta, Una Hoja Cae, Mexico)
Bowing at the IDFA Envision Competition, in the film Mexican queer siblings Semillites and Tania film their bodies with extreme close-ups, animations, projections or razor-sharp nature photography, pores becoming desert landscapes, skin cells salt flats, an IDFA description runs. “A collaborative journey, artistic and emotional, fed by powerful trans and queer education , transforming sequence by sequence and sustained by the tenderness between the siblings and their family,” producer Viana González told Variety.
‘Our Body Is an Expanding Star’
“The Same Blood,” (“La misma sangre,” Angel Linares, Mexico)
Featured in Linares’ first doc short, Rocío Mesino was assassinated one day before its premiere. Here, sister Norma heads a historic peasant organization in southern Mexico that confronts violence and impunity. Filming was an “incredibly difficult process, in which our lives were at risk on several occasions. However, thanks to a strong capacity to develop protocols, maintain clear communication with different stakeholders and the support of human rights organizations, we were able to move forward,” says Linares.
“Soy Mario,” Sharon Kleinberg,
Mario, a trans taxi driver, becomes pregnant. He’s delighted at becoming a father but is forced, before facing prejudices of society at large, to confront his sense of his own masculine identity. The first doc-feature from Kleinberg, a best fiction short film award winner for her 2022 directorial debut “Your Way My Way” (2022) at New York’s International Films Infest Festival.
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