In the future, wars will be fought over water, but in Mexico the war has already begun. This documentary contemplates Mexico’s destiny, telling the story of the struggle of its indigenous people to preserve their natural resources and their cultural identity.

Filmed in the idyllic Mayan Riviera, All Inclusive follows the story of a Chilean-Mexican family during their summer vacation. Facing the imminent arrival of a storm, each of the characters goes through unexpected situations that cause deep changes in their lives, and they have to deal with their innermost fears, conflicts and secrets. The trip will be unforgettable, but it will remind every member of the family of the ups and the downs that make up life. With a stellar cast featuring Jesús Ochoa, Valentina Vargas, Ana Serradilla, Martha Higareda, Jesús Zavala, Leonor Varela, Jaime Camil, Maya Zapata, Mónica Cruz and Edgar Vívar, All Inclusive is an appealing movie that talks about the search of happiness, the things we don’t say, tolerance and family love.

In 1999, two brothers were deported from the United States to Mexico. Within two weeks, one of them overdosed on heroin in a seedy Tijuana hotel room, his body left unclaimed for two months in a mass grave. These U.S.-raised men, military veterans, were deported from the only country they knew—and had sworn to protect—to forge new lives in Mexico. Against the backdrop of increased attention to the U.S.-Mexico border, filmmaker Monika Navarro draws on her family’s experience to explore national identity and ties, the lives of immigrants, and what happens after deportees are sent to a homeland they don’t consider home.

Arráncame la vida begins its journey during a transformative period in Mexican history. The Revolution of 1910 is over and the country’s rule is open to whatever politician had the audacity to grab it. Dominating men fight ruthlessly for control, manipulating and exploiting others to gain power. Growing up in 1930s Mexico, Catalina Guzmán knows little of the world beyond her father’s house, unaware of the political storm that looming over the whole country.

Bracero Stories explores the personal experiences of five former “guest workers” in the controversial US-Mexican government Bracero Program, which granted temporary work contracts to millions of Mexican laborers between 1942 and 1964. Their stories are interwoven and illustrated with archival materials, creating a composite narrative of the “bracero” experience. Interviews with other participants in the program assess its effectiveness—and its justness. These discussions mirror contemporary concerns about illegal immigration and the possible implementation of a new guest worker program. Ultimately, the film seeks to put a human face on the concept of foreign “guest worker.”

When Catalina Lunago falls in love with a fish and gets swallowed by marsh waters, her family will try to rescue her from the world of the “Chimbumbe.” The film is an adaptation of a traditional oral tale from San Basilio de Palenque, a village in northern Colombia declared as “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” by UNESCO.

Before dying, Nora devises a plan to make José, her ex-husband, take care of her funeral during the height of Passover celebration. But despite her meticulousness she misses something—the only flaw in the plan, a mysterious photograph left under the bed, which leads to unexpected outcomes that remind us that sometimes the greatest love stories are hidden in the smallest places. A heartwarming story of love, doubt, faith, and the importance of family.

Away from its body, the cut-off head of Juan Pérez The Great (a fifth class magician from a small circus), starts remembering how he lost his head to a guillotine. After a terrible six year crisis, the Circo Aztlán (where our magician has lived for so many years), had started cutting acts out. In order not to lose his job, Juan Pérez promised to stage a sensational decapitation act, which could return the circus to its glory days. Running out of time, and without a penny to build the machinery needed for his act, Juan Pérez was forced to steal an original Guillotine from a museum, unaware of its terrible curse.

Ana, a 50-year-old woman, falls into a depression when her husband leaves her. Once she finally decides to get over it, she begins to change from the outside in and, led by rekindled desire, starts a process in which she rediscovers her sexuality.

Past and present collide as filmmaker Natalia Almada brings to life audio recordings she inherited from her grandmother—reminiscences about Natalia’s great-grandfather General Plutarco Elías Calles, a revolutionary general who became president of Mexico in 1924. In his time, Calles was called “El Bolshevique” and “El Jefe Máximo” (the foremost chief). Today, he is remembered as “el Quema-Curas” (the Burner of Priests) and as a dictator who ruled through puppet presidents until he was exiled in 1936. Through his daughter’s recordings, El General moves between the memories of a daughter grappling with her memory of her family life versus history’s portrait of her father, and the weight of his legacy in the country today.

Several characters, feeling isolated and incomplete, share their solitude inside a maze-like house. They desperately seek to find a complement in each other.

The jungle madness known as Grissi Siknis is a contagious, naturally bound syndrome that occurs among the Miskito of Eastern Central America and affects mainly young women. Grissi Siknis is typically characterized by long periods of anxiety, nausea, dizziness, irrational anger and fear interlaced with short periods of rapid frenzy in which the victims lose consciousness, and believe that devils beat them, have sexual relations with them, and run away. Traditional Miskito tradition holds that Grissi Siknis is caused by possession by evil spirits or inflicted by a malevolent evil sorcerer. While Western medicine typically has no effect on those affected with the disease, the remedies of Miskito herbalists or healers are often successful in curing the madness.

The lodging house owned by Rosa Carbajal at the corner of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo streets in Mexico City, is a shelter that hides an intimate and passionate story. Twenty years ago Rosa met Jorge Riosse, a young tenant who became her closest friend and for eight years made indelible marks on everyone he knew. But after his sudden death, some dark characteristics emerged. The film is a profound sketch of two lonely characters whose lives become strongly and strangely entwined.

In a nursing home, where nothing is left but memories and loneliness, an elderly woman weaves her fate…. Winner of the 2009 Mexican Ariel for Best Animated Short Film.

A man remembers a childhood promise, which awakens his curiosity to seek out an old girlfriend again.

A small fishing village in the south of Chile becomes a magnet for hordes of divers, fishermen, merchants, businessmen and prostitutes, who flock in from around the country when the ban on a prized, yet endangered mollusk—“el loco” (the abalone)—is lifted ever so briefly by fishing authorities. Father Antonio is intent on both preventing his flock from running wild as well as raising enough cash for a new antenna that would allow his radio station, “Mother of the Divine Providence” to reach the entire region. The fishing village is also invaded by a small band of hookers led by Norma, a madam who drives her girls in a battered bus to any place around the country where there is action. Carlos Maldonado, a former local diver, comes home after a seven-year absence to join this bizarre group of people so he can buy abalone for a Japanese firm, and also to see Sonia, a love interest from the past.

Teenager Juan crashes his family’s car into a telegraph pole on the outskirts of town and then scours the streets searching for someone to help him fix it. His quest leads him to Don Heber, an old, paranoid mechanic whose only companion is his dog Sica; to Lucía, a young mother who is convinced that her real place in life is as a lead singer in a punk band; and to “The One Who Knows,” a teenage mechanic obsessed with martial arts and Kung Fu philosophy. The absurd and bewildering worlds of these characters engage Juan in a one-day journey during which he will come to accept what he was escaping from in the first place—an event both as natural and inexplicable as a loved one’s death.

In 1930, the American Smelting & Refining Company hired William "Bill" Parker to work at the Angangueo mines in Michoacán. Bill arrived with his girlfriend, Joyce Hartzell, a photographer. Bill and Joyce fell in love with the town and its simple ways and decided to make it their permanent home. Bill was an amateur filmmaker and used his 16mm camera to shoot several documentaries portraying day-to-day life in Angangueo and Joyce’s trips around Spain and South America. But Joyce died in 1975, victim to pulmonary cancer, and 36 days later, Bill shot himself in the head. Bill’s diary describes those last few days: from Joyce’s passing to his own suicide. The movies and photographs made by the Parkers over the years become the material that relives their memories and tells the story of these two lovers that even death couldn’t tear apart.

Los herederos is a portrait of the young children in the Mexican countryside who begin to work at an early age. The film focuses on their daily struggle for survival and their activities in farming, sculpting and painting “alebrijes,” shepherding, making bricks, weaving, looking after their siblings, collecting water, harvesting tomato, chili, maize, and laboring in a myriad of other activities. They have inherited tools and techniques from their ancestors, but they have also inherited their day-to-day hardship because, as generations pass, child workers seem to remain captive in a cycle of inherited poverty.

Rosa is a Mexican woman who, in 1999, at the age of 17, migrated illegally to Austin, Texas. In January of 2003, she was arrested for suspicion of murder and then sent to trial in August 2005. Rosa’s imprisonment in a foreign country, the judicial process, the verdict, the separation from her family, and her powerlessness make Mi vida dentro a true and revealing look into the life of Mexican immigrants in the United States.

Beto is the custodian of a house in Mexico City, left empty for several years, in which he used to work as a domestic helper. The solitude of the last ten years coupled with the monotony and routine of his job have led him to develop a pathological fear of the world outside, to the point of limiting his contacts to only two people: the owner of the house, for whom he has a feeling of deep gratitude and respect that is translated into obedience; and Lupe, a friend, a confidante, and a lover. News that the house is to go on sale causes a dilemma for Beto, who doesn't know whether he should dare to set forth and live or seek a way of remaining in his confinement.

Six months after Bob Mader passed away in 2005, his son, Austin filmmaker Berndt Mader, discovers his father’s camera loaded with a last roll of film. In an attempt to deal with his grief, Berndt decides to finish this final roll in the small Mexican village of Tlacotepec—a town his father had visited and photographed 40 years before. On his journey to this obscure Mexican village, Berndt is diverted to the country of Belize where his sister has run into legal trouble in her adoption of a Belizian baby. After this detour and other misadventures, Berndt finally makes it to the town in Mexico. There he discovers there are possible connections to the past and answers to the questions of his own memory.

When Ramona’s son, Osvaldo, disappears, she loses her calm and begins a search that leads her to contact the coroner, and to maybe even accept the possibility that her son is dead. With special appearances by Ana Ofelia Murgía and Damián Alcázar.

The near future. The world is divided by closed borders but connected by a digital network that ties together people around the world. Memo Cruz lives in an isolated farming community in Mexico, the kind of place that seems frozen in time—except for the hi-tech, militarized dam that was built by a corporation, and now controls the town’s water supply. Memo dreams of leaving his small pueblo and finding work in the hi-tech factories in the big cities in the north. On his journey north, he meets Luz, an aspiring journalist who dreams of writing a story that might one day change the world. Unwittingly their fates are manipulated by a chain of events emanating from the highest levels of technological advances.

Un fragmento de intimidad tells the story of two Mexican immigrant cross dressers in Montreal who are part of a show in which they portray famous Latin American women artists.

Voodoo Bayou tells the oddball tale of a Voodoo doll that springs to life after being stung by an electrified mosquito. Then, after discovering that he’s been used for evil purposes, he decides to escape—but it won’t be easy, since his master, a mysterious witch doctor, will not stop chasing him until he’s back in the villain’s wrinkled hands.