FQ Columnist Paul Julian Smith explores the latest trends in Mexican cinema, which encompasses such divergent genres as the rom-com and horror. Illustrating the former is the office comedy Mirreyes vs. Godinez (dir. Chava Cartas, 2019), which pits the spoiled offspring of the leisured class against the workers at their family company, a class conflict that predictably resolves through romantic alliances. In stark contrast is Belzebuth (dir. Emilio Portes, 2017), a disturbing film about the Satanic murder of children set in the tense and traumatic territory of Mexico's border with the United States. Finally, Smith looks at two productions—one an independent film, the other a televised sit-com—that use narratives about house shares to explore the theme of national reconciliation.

FQ Columnist Paul Julian Smith discusses the Mexican limited series, Malinche , which tracks the Spanish conquest of Mexico and destruction of the Mexica (Aztec) Empire from the perspective of the conquistador Hernán Cortés's interpreter, the indigenous woman Malinche. He explains how the series differs from other televisual accounts of the conquest of Mexico in both its emphasis on the domestic lives of women and its use of multiple indigenous languages. He concludes by comparing the series to a recent film about the colonial experience by another Latin American female director— Zama by Lucrecia Martel.

FQ Columnist Paul Julian Smith reports from Mexico on Netflix's redo of the traditional telenovela with its new series, La casa de las flores ( House of Flowers ). Smith argues that the series is not as innovative or trangressive as it claims to be and in fact, was preceded in many aspects by the cult Mexican independent series Mirada de mujer ( A Woman's Look ) in the late 1990s. Both series feature a grumpy patriarch, a dissatisfied mother and wife who embarks on an affair (with a much younger man, in the case of Mirada de mujer ), and three confused grown children, and both explore taboo topics such as AIDS, abortion, and interracial romance. Smith questions whether the U.S. newcomer, with its glossy production values, will prove to be as enduring as its homegrown predecessor.

The border-based dramedy Run, Coyote, Run (FOX Networks Group Latin America, 2017) ended its first season with the highest rating of any drama on Mexican TV. This column sketches the rapidly changing industrial mediascape that enables such novel productions in Mexico. Asking whether the new platforms made available by changing technology can facilitate content with new creative characteristics, the column explores industrial practice, professional profiles, and textual analysis to argue for Run, Coyote, Run as an example of a marquee series that incorporates the global/local nexus into the fabric of its complex televisual text.

FQ Columnist Paul Julian Smith reports from Peru on a new wave of pop culture, from variety shows to teen telenovelas, popping up on television. He also discusses the popularity of the musical comedy feature films that function as Peru's equivalent f the summer blockbuster. He closes his report with a discussion of the films of filmmaker and professor Rossana Díaz Costa, whose art-house style is in stark contrast to the broad comedies and melodramas of Peruvian popular culture. Her debut feature Viaje a Tombuktú (2014) sets its 1980s teenage love story against a backdrop of political violence, while her latest production—an adaptation of the classic Peruvian novel, Un mundo para Julius —probes race, class, and gender inequalities in 1950s Peru.

FQ Columnist Paul Julian Smith reviews the recent work of young writer-directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, celebrities universally known in Spain by the diminutive of their shared name, “ los Javis .” The backstory to their first feature film, the success of which so mystifies the established film press, is that of the couple's canny and creative appeal to the multiple media of theater, television, and Internet. The Javis work marks the emergence of a new youthful sensibility and a new gay auteurism in Spanish film and television.

Italian television scholar Milly Buonanno has often complained that, in this second Golden Age of TV, academic attention is focused almost exclusively on the United States. Even in a country like Spain, newspapers dutifully recap each episode of American premium-cable and streaming-service series while ignoring their own local productions. Hence, the importance of Buonanno's new collection Television Antiheroines: Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama , which tracks its female figures on screens from Italy and France to Australia and Brazil. Smith examines two prominent Spanish language TV shows featuring women in prison and concludes that Buonanno's invaluable book shows it is no longer necessary to ask where the female Tony Sopranos or Walter Whites may be. And, thanks to the compelling examples of Capadocia (HBO Latin America, 2008–12) and Spain's Vis a vis (Antena 3/Fox, 2015–), it is now clear that difficult women can speak Spanish as well as English on global TV screens, even as they are confined within them to the smallest of prison cells.

The seventh edition of the Statistical Yearbook of Mexican Cinema , which covers 2016, was launched at the Guadalajara International Film Festival by IMCINE (Instituto Méxicano de Cinematografía) , the national film institute. Some months later the eleventh edition of the Ibero-American Observatory of Television Fiction , also devoted to 2016, was presented by international research group OBITEL (Ibero-American Observatory of Television Fiction) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Both surveys compile exhaustive quantitative data and track qualitative trends in their respective media. This year, the pair offer invaluable evidence for evolution and convergence in the Mexican (and Spanish American) audiovisual field, thereby providing an account of the most important trends. Sometimes the findings can be counterintuitive, proving for example that (contrary to industry complaints) the Mexican government does indeed strongly support cinema and that (contrary to journalistic rumors of its demise) broadcast television is by no means dead in the region. But the handbooks also provide essential context for Netflix's first production in Mexico — and one of the most important and innovative series of recent years — the soccer comedy, Club de Cuervos ([Crows Club], 2015–). In keeping with this changing scene, OBITEL focused its case study of transmedia on Netflix's limited series Club de Cuervos . As noted in the handbook, the producers' aim was to avoid “telenovelizing” its content. Club de Cuervos exemplifies the trends seen in current Mexican film and television production, even as it blurs the distinction between the two in typical Netflix fashion. Mexican industry insiders still resent the U.S. domination of film distribution in theaters, and Club de Cuervos raises those stakes.

By happy coincidence, Mexico in 2016 yielded two expert and moving documentaries on women, sex, and aging: María José Cuevas's Bellas de noche ( Beauties of the Night ) and Maya Goded's Plaza de la Soledad ( Solitude Square ). Both are first-time features by female directors. And both are attempts to reclaim previously neglected subjects: showgirls of the 1970s and sex workers in their seventies, respectively. Moreover, lengthy production processes in which the filmmakers cohabitated with their subjects have resulted in films that are clearly love letters to their protagonists. Widely shown at festivals and beyond, Bellas de noche won best documentary at Morelia, Mexico's key festival for the genre, and was picked up by Netflix in the United States and other territories. Plaza de la Soledad , meanwhile, earned plaudits at Sundance and a theatrical release in its home country in May 2017, a rare opportunity for a documentary. Complex and contradictory, these twin films celebrate women whose lives may be limited by circumstances cruelly beyond their control but who are vital, still, in their quest for friendship and freedom.

Columnist Paul Julian Smith puts a Mexican TV hit that has gone global into perspective for FQ 's readers. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the seventeenth-century poet and nun, has a good claim to be the best-known woman in the history of Mexico. Looking scholarly on the two-hundred-peso banknote, where she is depicted with an ink quill and a volume of her collected works, she has long been an incongruous presence among the virile Aztecs, revolutionaries, and presidents that grace the rest of Mexican currency. But only now has she been awarded that special honor: a biographical television series on her richly resonant and mysterious life. Patricia Arriaga Jordán, perhaps the most distinguished television producer in the country, created Juana Inés for Canal 11, the free public broadcast channel owned by the Instituto Politécnico Nacional university with which she has long collaborated. The seven-hour-long episodes were broadcast nationally twice a week in prime time beginning on March 26, 2016, and subsequently sold for international distribution to Netflix where, at the time of writing, they are available in the United States.

The national mourning after Juan Gabriel's death has been reminiscent of the very public outpouring of emotion in the UK when Princess Diana died, also without warning. In spite of this shared collective mourning, contradictions in the figure of the icon became apparent almost immediately. While some press commentators congratulated a once-macho Mexico on its heartfelt devotion to this effeminate icon, others noted more skeptically that the same men weeping over the so-called divo de Juárez were also marching in demonstrations opposing the marriage-equality initiative proposed by President Peña Nieto. This new unanimity around the love for the instantly canonized Juan Gabriel was thus crosscut with an intermittent acknowledgment of the homosexuality of which he himself never spoke. In a famous formulation of the glass closet or open secret that was widely repeated on TV after his death, an interviewer on Univision had once asked him directly if he was gay. He had replied: “What you can see, you don't need to ask” ( Lo que se ve, no se pregunta ). Flagrantly visible, then, Juan Gabriel was also sternly silent, striking a knowing bargain with his socially conservative fans who would not ask if he did not tell. And he never took up a political position in favor of what Mexicans call “sexual diversity.”

Paul Julian Smith assesses Pedro Almodóvar's twentieth feature, Julieta , released in Spain to widespread press controversy and relative audience indifference, alongside three other recently released Spanish films that are making waves in Spain and elsewhere: the big-budget historical romance Palmeras en la nieve ( Palm Trees in the Snow , Fernando González Molina, 2015), La novia ( The Bride , Paula Ortiz, 2016), and Nuestros amantes ( Our Lovers , Miguel Ángel Lamata, 2016).

FQ Columnist Paul Julian Smith discusses a new cinematic phenomenon that has emerged in Mexico in the last five years: the transgender documentary. Three features have appeared so far, all by first-time directors: Morir de pie ( To Die Standing Up , Jacaranda Correa, 2011), Quebranto ( Disrupted , Roberto Fiesco, 2013), and Made in Bangkok (Flavio Florencio, 2015). The films are self-proclaimed stories of love, even as they testify intermittently to disruption or affliction ( quebranto , from quebrar or “to break” as cited in one title). This article examines the three commonalities of these films: they address their protagonists’ activity either in the performing arts or in politics; their geographical reach extends beyond the borders of the Mexican state; and their transnational narratives break out of the barriers of subjectivity to embrace an analysis of intersubjectivity.

FQ Columnist Paul Julian Smith traces the changes in queer Mexican cinema since the 1990s and asks: What does it mean for a film to be both queer and mainstream? Recent Mexican features with lesbian, gay, and trans themes pose this question. They are audience-friendly genre movies, either romantic comedies or thrillers, naturalistic in style, apolitical in attitude, and commercially produced in the hope of exhibition in theaters. Reaching out through social media to a queer community of viewers, they also seek to connect closely with their audience. Smith suggests that a new corpus of queer films is emerging that may be premature in rejecting the political and artistic radicalism of earlier Mexican queer cinema. The great virtue of these new queer films, however, is that they aim to connect with an audience beyond the art house that needs—in these changing, challenging times—to see this newly visible community represented on the big screen.

FQ columnist Paul Julian Smith examines the state of contemporary filmmaking in the Catalan region of Spain. Despite stories that have larger Spanish and international appeal, Smith refreshingly concludes that an antilocal aesthetic does not preclude a Catalonian influence and that Catalans will continue to make decisive contributions to both a commercial Spanish cinema that is aesthetically indebted to television and a less mainstream auteur filmmaking whose cinephile references cite both local tradition and Hollywood history.

Columnist Paul Julian Smith discusses the state of television in Mexico and speculates on what the future may hold. There are plans to launch three new networks, one public and two private in the coming year. As a result of President Peña Nieto's telecommunications reform, there is for the first time a prospect of real competition for media dinosaur Televisa. As a result, television conglomerates’ recent move to the live stage reveals an attempt to purchase a more direct link to their popular audience.

Regular FQ columnist Paul Julian Smith looks back on the 40-year history o Mexico’s State Film School and interviews the main players and administrators who give their predictions for the future of the school. Smith discusses the CCC’s competitors, and the challenges that they face in keeping their institution relevant in the Mexican media market.