Netflix in Mexico or “Emilia Pérez” vs “Roma”

As reported in these spaces, last Thursday, February 20, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos appeared on “La mañanera del pueblo” to announce a multi-million dollar investment in Mexico.

Ironically, this is being done in the midst of ongoing diplomatic wrangling between the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, and the president of the United States, Donald Trump, which has led the Aztec leader to practically refer to the “war cry” in defense of our sovereignty, which leads us to the reasonable doubt of whether the multi-million dollar agreement to encourage series and films in national territory will give the aforementioned “local producers” to whom these financial supports are directed enough autonomy to create worthy content in the tradition of the 2018 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” or quite the opposite.

This is because, above all, Netflix is ​​a purely Hollywood company, and if the aforementioned Donald Trump announced among his first occurrences at the beginning of his second term that he was naming, among others, Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone as his “representatives” in the Mecca of Cinema, it is enough to remember “the help” that these two gave to the image of our country in films like “Get the Gringo” (Adrian Grumberg, 2012) or the worse “Rambo 4” (Adrian Grumberg, 2019), not to mention that this year Netflix's biggest bet for the Oscar this year (including, again, for Best Foreign Film) is the controversial production “Emilia Pérez”, by Jacques Audiard.

That said, and without knowing the behind-the-scenes details of this agreement, it is worth remembering that if Mexico lived a "Golden Age" in terms of box office quantity and quality of content in the dark years of the proliferation of Nazism in Europe in the second half of the 1930s, it was largely due to the TOTAL autonomy we had from the United States, since while our northern neighbors gave priority to their war industry over Hollywood when entering fully into World War II, our country gave it to our audiovisual industry with the sole condition of exalting our nationalism and integrating cinema into the basic basket of its inhabitants.

This is how many Mexican filmmakers such as Emilio “Indio” Fernández from Coahuila, Alejandro Galindo and Rogelio A. González from Monterrey, and Julio Bracho from Durango, among others, gave identity to a national Seventh Art that is still admired and applauded both in Mexico and abroad. How can we be assured that in exchange for receiving the aforementioned financial support, the filmmakers commit to dancing to the tune of “Roma” or “Emilia Pérez.”

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