Perla Ciuk puts her updated dictionary of Mexican film directors online.

 

Mexico City.  In the late 1990s, Perla Ciuk was a film critic for the newspaper  unomásuno  and encountered a recurring problem: when writing about Mexican productions, she couldn't find information about contemporary filmmakers, such as their careers or training.

1999 was a watershed year, he believes, as Mexican productions not only saw the emergence of a different language, but also a different way of telling stories and even of addressing other themes in striking films such as  Sex, Shame and Tears  (1999) by Antonio Serrano;  Who the Hell is Juliette?  (1997) by Carlos Marcovich;  Santitos  (1999) by Alejandro Springall; and  Todo el poder  (2000) by Fernando Sariñana.

“I'm using them as an example, as there wasn't a single publication by them. There were books by iconic directors that you had to look for in the National Film Library, in a library, or in the work of Emilio García Riera or Jorge Ayala Blanco, who basically focus on films, not filmmakers,” explains the researcher, a communications graduate with a specialty in film, with a postgraduate degree in film analysis and criticism from Anáhuac University.

Faced with this shortcoming, he turned to one of his former professors, Alejandro Pelayo Rangel, then and currently director of the Cineteca , to propose a project with a more than practical purpose: to create a dictionary of Mexican filmmakers. However, as he deepened his research and became more aware of the rigor of data processing, he realized that it wasn't enough to create a simple index of a couple of paragraphs, but rather to turn whenever possible to original sources, that is, to living directors.