Tracing the integration of digital technologies in film production and distribution that empowered a generation of filmmakers and expanded the global market for Mexican films.

Digital filmmaking and distribution have transformed the movies from what gets made and how to who gets to experience it. But while this has been a global evolution, local cultural forces have also played a decisive role. Mexico is a case in point. In Mexican Cinema in the Digital Age, Marvin D’Lugo traces the dramatic impact of technological innovation on one country’s film industry and aesthetics, revealing profound interactions between art and nation in an era when cultural products know no borders.

Through close analysis of more than twenty movies made this century, D’Lugo shows how technological advances fed the creative energies of Mexican filmmakers. In particular, the agility of the mobile digital camera contributed to a new audiovisual style in Mexico, which achieved global commercial success in the pre-streaming age. Since then, the rise of streaming has encouraged filmmakers to create works that are understood as distinctively Mexican yet marketable to global audiences. As a result, ordinary Mexicans increasingly see their own society through the eyes of outsiders. D’Lugo argues that the consequence has been a novel political subjectivity, as today’s cinema promotes a sense of Mexican cultural affiliation shorn of old nationalist tropes.

Marvin D'Lugo is a professor emeritus of Spanish and screen studies at Clark University. He is the author of The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing, Guide to the Cinema of Spain, and Pedro Almodóvar, and coeditor of Companion to Pedro Almodóvar and The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema.

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction. Repositioning Mexican Cinema in the Digital Age
• 1. Digital Mimicry in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018)
• 2. A New Digital Aesthetics (2000–2005)
• 3. Movies and Audiences on the Move (2005–2010)
• 4. Crossing Corporate and Cultural Borders (2010–2015)
• 5. The Nation under Erasure (2015–2020)
• Epilogue. Bardo, or the Digital Diaspora (2022)
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Filmography
• Works Cited
• Index