Guadalajara Fest Launches FICG Goes to Berlin, Celebrating 40 Years

To celebrate 40 years, Mexico’s Guadalajara Film Festival, based out of Mexico’s second biggest city and Guillermo del Toro’s home town, is doing what it has always done: taking Mexican films and talent, especially new voices, to the world. 

In its latest initiative, Berlin’s legendary Kino Babylon will host a showcase of recent notable titles from the Guadalajara Festival, FICG in popular parlance, and headed from 2019 by Estrella Araiza.

Running Jan. 30-Feb. 8, the FICG Goes to Berlin showcase will unspool as the Festival gears up for its 2026 edition, taking place April 17-25. The Kino Babylon, opened in 1929 and still going strong despite vicissitudes, is an appropriate venue for Guadalajara’s 40th anniversary showcase.

Launched in 1986, and focusing on films from Mexico and beyond it, the rest of Latin America, Spain and Portugal,  the festival had seen good times and bad in state funding and survived COVID-19 to consolidate, hitting 40 as one of, if not the biggest of film festivals in Latin American, with a 2025 attendance figure for its 40th edition,  including all activities, of 289,777, according to Araiza’s final count. Only Brazil’s Rio Film Festival may come close to that popular impact. 

An industry pioneer, now set to stage its 22nd edition of its Co-Production Meeting and 20th Guadalajara Construye pix-in-post showcase in 2026, Guadalajara welcomed 1,473 industry participants to a 2025 program which also took in TV focused Episodio Cero, a DocuLab, a local talent-focused Pitch Guadalajara and Talents Guadalajara, a Talent Project Market and a vid-game-themed FICGames Playtest. 

FICG Goes to Berlin: 10 Highlights from the Lineup

Not only a celebration, FICG Goes to Berlin also marks part of festivals’ transformation from one-off events to round-the-year culture and entertainment business drivers. The event takes in 18 fiction features and 9 doc-features. Below, Variety takes a closer look at 10 bound for Berlin which were Guadalajara highlights in its 2024 and 2025 editions. 

The 10 and the FICG Goes to Berlin showcase at large also says a lot about current Mexican cinema. 

Of Variety’s choices, some titles and directors have a higher profile. One case in point: Produced by Diego Luna (“Ardor”), “State of Silence,” the fourth doc feature by Mexico’s Santiago Maza (“The Thunder Feast”) world premiered at Tribeca and was picked up by Netflix for North and Latin America.  

Likewise, “Rock, Weeds and Rocanrol” marks the latest from one of Mexico’s greatest mavericks, José Manuel Cravioto, a “Diablero ” showrunner and director on “El Chapo” and Alex Pina’s “Billionaires’ Bunker.” “Corina” was a global 2025 SXSW Audience Award winner, then nominated for eight Mexican Academy Ariel Awards. 

Of the other eight films in Variety’s selection, six are first solo feature debuts, reflecting Guadalajara’s status as a key platform for the exhibition and international promotion of new voices. 

Some major titles in FICG Goes to Berlin carry large social point.“State of Silence” begins, for example, by pointing up the appalling death count among journalists in Mexico and delivers a memorable homage to those who continue to put their lives on the line. 

“Rock, Weeds and Rocanrol” nails the unbending conservatism of Mexico’s establishment. FICG Goes to Berlin takes in, however, a broad spread of features, running a gamut from the auteurist and LGBTQ (“After”) to a crossover love story (“Café Chainel”).

Above all, as the world goes to pot, many of FICG Goes to Berlin titles explore bedrock relations, of father and son or mother and son, for instance. “I was keen to highlight the love between father and son with the hope that their story would reflect our own aspirations and inspire us to believe that we too can realize our dreams,” says Pourailly of “The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine.”

Depicting such profound bonds, film can of course stir powerful emotions. Expect, for example, that there will be very few dry eyes in the house when “Concert For Other Hands,” a father-son story, plays at Berlin’s Kino Babylon.

Variety’s take on just 10 of the films playing at FICG Goes to Berlin:

“After,” (“Después,” Sofia Gomez Cordova, Mexico)

After the death at 20 of her son, quite possibly a suicide, Carmen, has to accept that their relationship, however deep, still had its hidden secrets, as a future opens up of self-discovery. “A reflection on motherhood when social precepts on gender roles, love relationships ad sexuality are transforming,” Gómez Córdova has said of the film. Produced by Guadalajara’s Bruja Azul. 

“Café Chairel,” (Fernando Barreda Luna, Mexico)

Starring “After Lucía’s” Tessa la, a second chance romantic drama set in the picturesque port of Tampico, as Alfonso (Maurice Isaac) and Katia (la), both suffering deep loss, launch a café and haltingly awaken to life. The second feature as a director of Barreda Luna, produced by his label Nopal Army Films (“Crocodiles”).

“Concert for Other Hands,” (“Concerto para otras manos,” Ernesto Gonzalez Díaz, 2024, Mexico)

“It’s what every father desires – for your tastes, passions to be shared by a son,” classical pianist José Luis says in “Concert for Other Hands.” But son David is born with a short arm and a hand with four fingers. Remarkably, he sets out to play in public a concerto for piano and orchestra composed for him by José Luis. A modest but touching father-son relationship doc-feature from González Díaz (“Escucha”) which received the 2025 Mexican Cinema Journalists’ best documentary award. 

“Corina,” (Urzula Barba Hopfner, Mexico) 

“A refreshingly endearing, surprisingly incisive defence of happy endings that plays like a Mexican ‘Amélie,’” says Variety, with “Ted Lasso” actor Cristo Fernández co-starring in a stylized dramedy about a 20 year-old who’s never ventured from her close neighbourhood until she sets out to find a writer who could save her job, and her colleagues’, at a local publishing house. Lead produced by Mandarina Cine, also behind “Nudo Mixteco” and Berlinale Perspectives winner “The Devil Smokes.”

“The Fabulous Gold Harvesting Machine,”(“La fabulosa máquina de cosechar oro,” Alfredo Pourailly, Chile, Netherlands)

A top winner at Guadalajara, Sanfic and Lima in 2024, the story of charismatic artisanal gold miner Toto whose devoted son is building a gold harvesting machine – virtually on his own – to help his ailing father. Their poignant expressions of relief at the  end when they finally get the machine up and running are worth their weight in gold. From Chile’s ambitious Juntos Films.  

“The Mollusk,” (“Molusco,” Mauricio Bidault, Mexico)

Bidault’s latest documentary and third feature. It chronicles the life and times of storied Mexican graphic artist José Ignacio Solórzano, known professionally as Jis, who shot to fame, Variety recalls, with “El Santos,” “a collection of whacked-out narratives that featured graphic sex, drugs and quotidian minutiae.” Jis stars but talking heads include Guillermo del Toro and Diego Luna. 

“Rock, Weeds and Rocanrol,” (“Autos, Mota y Rocanrol,” José Manuel Cravioto), Mexico 

A ‘70s set mockumentary based on true facts: How el Negro and Justino set out to organize a car race which balloons into Mexico’s Woodstock, attended by 150,000 revellers. Mexico’s blow-hards had a field day, one lambasting “a hell of naked depravity, blood, potheads and death.” Its government cracked down on rock ’n’ roll, which took a decade to recover.

 “State of Silence,” (“Estado de silencio,” Santiago Maza, Mexico)

A recent standout from Mexico by any standard. What sets “State of Silence” apart is its sense of intimacy as its follows the lives of four journalists who refuse to be silent about Mexico’s crux: the toxic mix of organized crime syndicates and local governments, or narco-politics. Fast-paced in its interviews, “State of Silence” achieves an aesthetic cinematographic finish with the idea of ennobling the extraordinary courage of journalists portrayed, Maza explained to Variety.   

“Twelve Moons,” (“Doce Lunas,” Victoria Franco)

A 2025 Tribeca International Narrative Competition entry, led by Ana de la Reguera (“Ana,” “Nacho Libre” ), star of Ariel Winograd’s Mexican B.O, breakout “Una Pequeña Confusion.” Here, she plays playing Sofía, 40, an architect in emotional freefall after a loss, battling infertility and ever spiralling addiction. Shot in b/w by director Victoria Franco and ace DP Sergio Armstrong (“Neruda”), Franco’s solo debut after helming with brother Michel Franco 2013’s “Through the Eyes.” “Twelve Moons” is produced by Michel Franco, sold by The Match Factory. 

“We Shall Not Be Moved,” (“No nos moverán,” Pierre Saint-Martin, Mexico)

Mexico’s 2026 Oscar entry and hailed by Variety as an “auspicious” debut, “a scorching chamber piece about the country’s unhealed wounds.” It stars veteran actress Luisa Huertas as a now aged lawyer Soccoro seeking extrajudicial revenge decades after her brother is murdered during the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre. “Tightly conceived,” says Variety, and produced by Mexico’s Varios Lobos (“Tragic Jungle,” “The Darkness”).