Mexican Film Festival

The Mexican Film Festival was established by the Mexican Consulate in Indianapolis to bring contemporary Latin American and Latino cinema to the city. During the festival’s inaugural year of 2003, the consulate partnered with the Indianapolis Public Library and Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance to bring twelve films to the city. This was the first Indianapolis cultural event sponsored by the city’s Mexican Consulate outside of the traditional fall-time Hispanic Heritage Month. For the next two decades, the festival served as a platform for diverse voices and stories, with a goal of building cultural pride and promoting intercultural understanding.

The festival’s origins came through a collaboration between Kathi Kemp-Tejeda, immigrant outreach librarian for the Indianapolis Public Library, and the Mexican consul at the time, Sergio Aguilera Beteta. The consul had expressed to Kemp-Tejeda a desire to promote local cross-cultural experiences through some type of Mexican cultural programming, and Kemp-Tejeda’s proposal of a film festival garnered his enthusiasm. Kemp-Tejeda then worked with the consular staff to select a dozen feature films and documentaries, to be shown between April 5th and 27th. Three of these were directed by Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel, widely considered one of cinema’s most influential surrealist filmmakers. Also included was Chaac: El Dios de la Lluvia (Chac: The Rain God), a 1975 film exploring Mayan spiritual beliefs, which had garnered critical acclaim but little public notice in the US. The twelve films, each subtitled in English, together offered a diverse view of Mexican history and society.

The films were shown at select Indianapolis Public Library branches, each chosen for a specific reason. The Glendale branch was characterized as the library’s “premier programming branch,” the Eagle branch was patronized by a sizable Latino (predominantly Mexican) population, and the Fountain Square branch was nestled in a neighborhood known for its vibrant arts scene.

The success of the spring Mexican Film Festival led to a follow-up festival in November 2003. Though Kemp-Tejeda by then had left Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Public Library continued its collaboration with the Mexican Consulate to screen 11 feature films and documentaries with English subtitles at select branch locations. This time, the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago provided most of the films. These films engaged with the culture and history of a broader segment of the city’s Latino population, including migrants from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela, as well as those born in the United States. A growing local Latino population created a larger audience for cultural and artistic work aimed at those audiences.

After 2010, the film festival significantly altered its approach in order to maintain its distinctiveness in relation to other local cinema festivals. Events such as the Indy Film Fest, the Oscar-qualifying Indy Shorts International Film Festival, and the Heartland International Film Festival increasingly screened Mexican and other Latin American and Latino films. In response to this expansion of options for filmgoers, the Mexican Film Festival shifted from showing many films in multiple locations to showing only one film at a single location. In addition to the Indianapolis Public Library, the Mexican Consulate has also partnered with additional organizations, such as Newfields and the Indiana State Museum, to screen the films under the banner Contemporary Mexican Film Festival.

The last Mexican film shown under this festival moniker was screened in October 2023 at the Indiana State Museum. Though the Mexican Film Festival became dormant in 2024 after 21 years of operation, the museum anticipates resurrecting the film series in the fall of 2025.