Mexican director Jorge Fons died on Thursday, September 22 at the age of 83, of undisclosed causes. A veteran director with a relatively small but important filmography, nine feature films in a career spanning over four decades, he was a leading figure of Mexican cinema. Some of his key titles including the Berlinale Silver Bear-winning film The Bricklayers / Los albañiles, Red Dawn / Rojo amanecer, and Midaq Alley / El callejón de los milagros.
Fons was born on April 23, 1938 in Tuxpan, Veracruz. He participated in various student theater productions, and was a founding member of the Tlalnepantla Theater in the late fifties, and studied acting and stage direction. He was part of the first generation of film directors at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), graduating in 1967. He worked as an assistant director for a handful of films in the late sixties and made his directorial debut with the segment '“La sorpresa” for the 1969 omnibus film Trampas de amor.
A year later, he premiered his debut feature film, the satirical western El quelite starring Manuel López Ochoa, Lucha Villa and Héctor Suárez. In 1972, he directed the segment “Nosotros” for the omnibus movie Tu, yo, nosotros, and a year later he made his English-language debut with the American western Jory, starring Robby Benson in the title role, and adapted from the 1969 novel of the same name by Milton R. Bass. That same year he also directed the drama The Cubs / Los cachorros starring José Alonso and Helena Rojo, about a man who was mutilated in his childhood and struggles with frustration and the need to prove his manhood.
In 1974, Fons directed the segment ‘Caridad’ for the omnibus movie Fe, esperanza y caridad, which was considered by critics a formal pinnacle of Mexican cinema. His 1976 drama The Bricklayers / Los albañiles, based on the theater play by Vicente Leñero, premiered in the official competition at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was awarded the Silver Bear. Starring Ignacio López Tarso, Jaime Fernández, and José Alonso, the social drama follows the investigation after the murder of a worker on a construction side, revealing the corruption and mistreatment to which the workers were subject to by the foremen.
In 1980, he directed the documentary Así es Vietnam from a screenplay by Gabriel García Márquez, Luis Carrión, Vicente Silva and himself; and in 1989, he directed the low-budget Red Dawn, starring Héctor Bonilla, María Rojo, Demian Bichir, Eduardo Palomo, and Bruno Bichir. The film became an instant staple of Mexican cinema, as it was the first fiction film to focus on the killing of the students protesting at the Tlatelolco Square, in Mexico City, at the hands of the military, just 10 days before the start of the Olympic Games in October 1968. After an initial attempt by the government to censor the film failed, it received ample visibility and had a successful theatrical release in 1990. The film’s success opened the door for the Mexican urban middle classes to return to cinemas after having been turned off for more than a decade by the popular and exploitative narco-cinema and soft-core comedies that had populated Mexican moviehouses throughout the eighties.
Five years later, Fons directed the drama Midaq Alley, the film adaptation of the eponymous novel by Egyptian Nobel Prize–winner Naguib Mahfouz. The novel’s original setting of Cairo during World War II was transposed to downtown Mexico City in the early nineties. The film narrates the life of the members of a neighborhood and the connection between them Don Ru, the owner of the local pub; Eusebia, his wife; Chava, his son and Abel his friend, who emigrate to USA in search of fortune.
Midaq Alley had a stellar ensemble cast including Ernesto Gómez Cruz, María Rojo, Bruno Bichir, Delia Casanova, Daniel Giménez Cacho, and Margarita Sanz, and featured the cinematic breakthrough of Salma Hayek. Fons’s film had its world premiere in the official competition at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival, where it was awarded a special mention, and it became the most awarded Mexican film ever—winning 11 Ariel Awards including for Best Picture and Best Director, and more than 50 international awards and nominations
Fons last film was the 2010 historic drama The Attempt Dossier / El atentado, based on the novel by the Mexican Álvaro Uribe and starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, José María Yazpik, and Julio Bracho, about an assassination attempt perpetrated in 1897, by a dipsomaniac man, against the President of the Mexican Republic, General Porfirio Diaz. Fons served as president of the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences between 1998 and 2002.
