The Politics-Commodity: The Rise of Mexican Commercial Documentary in the Neoliberal Era

Abstract

Sánchez Prado studies the ways in which new forms of Mexican documentary filmmaking have allowed for the genre to be commercially distributed. Using the success of the film Presunto culpable (Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete, 2006) as a point of departure, he shows how certain documentary films, by directors like Juan Carlos Rulfo or Lynn Fainchtein, among others, stray from paradigms of activist politics and the “social documentary” to engage the politics and values of middle- and upper-class audiences who constitute the core of Mexico’s commercial market. The author discusses and critiques how these films participate in private structures of production and circulation, akin to those of successful fiction films, and how their politics is often intentionally ambiguous so as to have wide appeal.