Filmcollege: Iñárritu + Amores perros (2000)
In this film lecture, Hugo Emmerzael explores the work of Alejandro G. Iñárritu, one of the most distinctive filmmakers to emerge from contemporary Mexican cinema. From Amores perros to 21 Grams and Babel to The Revenant, Iñárritu has developed a cinema in which seemingly separate lives, places and events gradually reveal their connections. With the release of his new film Digger, this lecture offers an opportunity to look back at the director’s remarkable career and the cinematic language he has developed over the past decades.
At the heart of his work is what could be called the globalized puzzle film: stories that fragment time and perspective, moving between characters and across borders, while asking us to piece together how individual lives intersect. Through 21 Grams and Babel, Hugo examines how Iñárritu turns this fragmented structure into a way of thinking about a world that has become increasingly interconnected, yet remains marked by distance, coincidence and misunderstanding. His later work expands this perspective further, exploring the fraught power dynamics between Mexico and the United States and crafting a cinematic universe that confronts the global plight of displaced people, who are too often reduced to the category of “immigrant.” In films such as Bardo and the virtual reality experience Carne y Arena, Iñárritu pushes his cinema beyond conventional storytelling to explore questions of migration, identity, borders and belonging.
After the lecture, we screen Amores perros (2000), Iñárritu’s striking debut feature. Set in Mexico City, the film brings three stories together through a single car crash, creating a raw and visceral portrait of violence, desire and chance, and laying the foundations for the cinematic language Iñárritu would develop in the years that followed.
- 19:30
Kies tijdstip
- filmspecial
In this film lecture, Hugo Emmerzael explores the work of Alejandro G. Iñárritu, one of the most distinctive filmmakers to emerge from contemporary Mexican cinema. From Amores perros to 21 Grams and Babel to The Revenant, Iñárritu has developed a cinema in which seemingly separate lives, places and events gradually reveal their connections. With the release of his new film Digger, this lecture offers an opportunity to look back at the director’s remarkable career and the cinematic language he has developed over the past decades.
At the heart of his work is what could be called the globalized puzzle film: stories that fragment time and perspective, moving between characters and across borders, while asking us to piece together how individual lives intersect. Through 21 Grams and Babel, Hugo examines how Iñárritu turns this fragmented structure into a way of thinking about a world that has become increasingly interconnected, yet remains marked by distance, coincidence and misunderstanding. His later work expands this perspective further, exploring the fraught power dynamics between Mexico and the United States and crafting a cinematic universe that confronts the global plight of displaced people, who are too often reduced to the category of “immigrant.” In films such as Bardo and the virtual reality experience Carne y Arena, Iñárritu pushes his cinema beyond conventional storytelling to explore questions of migration, identity, borders and belonging.
After the lecture, we screen Amores perros (2000), Iñárritu’s striking debut feature. Set in Mexico City, the film brings three stories together through a single car crash, creating a raw and visceral portrait of violence, desire and chance, and laying the foundations for the cinematic language Iñárritu would develop in the years that followed.
