Mexican filmmaker Paul Leduc died today at age 78 of undisclosed causes. A key figure in Mexican cinema, his cinema marked the emergence of socially conscious filmmaking in the country in the early seventies, and he’s best known for his films Reed: Insurgent Mexico / Reed: México insurgente (1972) and Frida Still Life / Frida, naturaleza viva (1983)—both voted as two of the best Mexican films of all time.
Born on March 11, 1942 in Mexico City, Leduc studied architecture and theater at the National University (UNAM), and film at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEHC) in Paris, where he studied with Jean Rouch. After his return to Mexico he founded the film collective Cine 70 with Rafael Castanedo, Alexis Grivas, and Berta Navarro and worked as a film critic for El Día newspaper and Nuevo Cine magazine.
He worked as assistant director for Claudio Isaac’s official documentary of the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, and made some short films in the late sixties and early seventies. In 1971 he worked with Argentine filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer in his potent documentary Mexico: The Frozen Revolution / México, la revolución congelada. That same year, Leduc shot his first feature film Reed: Insurgent Mexico. Starring Claudio Obregón, Eduardo López Rojas, and Ernesto Gómez Cruz, the film is a dramatization of the experiences of American journalist John Reed (famous for his personal account of the Russian Revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World) covering, and eventually participating, in the Mexican Revolution in 1913.
Reed: Insurgent Mexico (1972)
Reed: Insurgent Mexico premiered at Cannes Directors Fortnight in 1972, and was the winner of the Georges Sadoul Prize for best film by a new director. Leduc’s debut feature was also selected as Mexico’s Oscar candidate, and was the winner of the Ariel Award for Best Picture presented by Mexico’s Academy of Film Arts and Sciences.
Through the rest of the seventies, Leduc committed to making documentary films including Sur: sureste 2604 (1973), El mar (1975), and Estudios para un retrato (1977), and in 1977 he premiered his powerful documentary feature Mezquital: Notes About an Ethnocide / Etnocidio: Notas sobre El Mezquital, an exposé film denouncing the centuries-old exploitation of the thousands of Otomi people, and an exploration of the socioeconomic factors causing the injustices.
In 1981 Leduc directs the mini series The Oil Conspiracy / Complot Petróleo: La cabeza de la hidra, based on the writings of acclaimed Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes with a screenplay by Héctor Aguilar Camín, Tomás Pérez Turrent, the director, and Fuentes himself.
Two years later, Leduc directed his most famous film, Frida Still Life, starring Ofelia Medina in the title role. The film is an experimental biopic with almost no dialogue that chronicles the life of famed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, and her encounter with the personalities of her time. Despite being confined to a wheelchair as a result of polio, operations and amputations, she faced and traced some of the most colorful and controversial aspects of Mexican history.
Frida Still Life (1983)
Frida Still Life was the winner of eight Ariel Awards including for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress, was also the winner of the top prize for Best Film at the Havana Film Festival, and was also Mexico’s Oscar candidate for the Best Foreign Language Film competition.
Leduc followed the success of Frida Still Life with the 1986 film ¿Cómo ves?, a gritty musical drama about life in the ghettos of Mexico City during the 1980s. Featuring a soundtrack of Mexican rock music, the film starring Roberto Sosa, Blanca Guerra, and Cecilia Toussaint, exposes the hunger, repression, unhealthy conditions and violence in the marginal communities of the country’s capital city.
During the late eighties and early nineties, Leduc directed a loose trilogy of films where we took his narrative to the extreme, using mostly music, with no dialogue and expressionistic aesthetics: Barroco (1989), Latino Bar (1991), and Dollar Mambo (1993). Inspired by the Cuban novel Concierto barroco by Alejo Carpentier and featuring actors Angela Molina and Francisco Rabal, and musicians Silvio Rodriguez, Pablo Milanes, and Van Van, the film is a series of images, music and sounds that recounts the history of Latin America.
Starring Dolores Pedro and Roberto Sosa, Latino Bar is an unlikely romance film that follows a woman working in a cabaret club in the Caribbean who meets a man recently released of jail, while Dollar Mambo is a continuation of the previous film set in a small town on Panama’s Canal Zone leading up to the American invasion.
Cobrador: In God We Trust (2006)
In 2006 Leduc directed Cobrador: In God We Trust, an international co-production starring Peter Fonda, Lázaro Ramos, and Antonella Costa, Milton Gonçalves, Dolores Heredia, and Isela Vega, and based on three short stories by Brazilian writer Rubem Fonseca.
Produced by Leduc’s ex-wife and longtime producer Berta Navarro, the film tells the story of a Miami millionaire with sociopathic tendencies and an Argentine photographer who team up to go on a killing spree in Mexico. The film received several Ariel nominations, winning the award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Leduc was recipient of numerous awards including the National Prize for Arts and Sciences in 2013, and a Lifetime Achievement Ariel Award in 2016. He is survived by his daughter Valentina and his son Juan, and his grandchildren.
