Diego Luna presents his film ‘Mexico 86’ at World Cup time
Por Miriam Gonzalez ·
‘Mexico 86’, the new film starring Diego Luna, revived in the Mexican actor his childhood, marked by the 1985 earthquake – the country’s greatest natural disaster – and the celebration of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, one of the greatest joys of national soccer in living memory just over two weeks before the inauguration of what will be the third World Cup in the country.
“It is a Mexico that I have very much engraved and alive in my memory, I was only six years old when the earthquake happened. To talk about ‘Mexico 86’ is to talk about my childhood and my first approach to soccer. A relationship that began there and has not ended yet,” Luna told EFE on Monday for the premiere of the film this June 5 on Netflix.
Although this is one of the greatest milestones in Mexican soccer, a large part of the population is still unaware of how the country managed to convince FIFA to award it the World Cup, after the highest soccer body withdrew the host country from Colombia due to the serious economic crisis and the resurgence of the armed conflict.
For this reason, the director of the feature film Gabriel Ripstein, known for having participated in the making of series such as ‘Narcos’, decided to tell the ins and outs of Mexico hosting its second World Cup, with a story based on real events, but starring the fictional character of Martín de la Torre, played by Luna.
Diego Luna returns to Mexican cinema with ‘Mexico 86’.
With ‘Mexico 86’, Luna returns to Mexican cinema with a soccer story, as he did with ‘Rudo y Cursi’ (2008) alongside his colleague Gael García Bernal, but this time at a different moment in his career, after having achieved recognition for his participation in international productions.
“I don’t feel like I’ve gone anywhere, what happened is that television became present and between ‘Narcos: Mexico’, ‘Andor’ and ‘The Machine’ (2024) it’s been eight years of my life. What I like are stories that have a beginning and an end, and if they can last two hours or less, all the better, so I like to tell stories like the ones I learned about cinema as a spectator,” said Luna, 46.
‘Mexico 86’ is Ripstein’s portrait of a country “not yet globalized” in which games were still “accessible” to all pockets and in which fans went to “buy their tickets the same day”.
“Soccer changed after ’86 and became this gigantic thing, where probably the global reach is exorbitantly greater than it was then, although it also brings with it a certain inaccessibility,” laments the filmmaker, who thus adds to the criticism of the World Cup expressed by García Bernal, who questioned in a speech at the Cannes Film Festival “the reputation of FIFA.”
For Luna, the film also addresses the country’s political change under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government, in a context of “a political system that was already self-destructing” and that in those years lost “all its popularity”, while the people “felt abandoned by the State”.
“The ’86 World Cup is a great pretext to look at this social and political complexity. A very strong community response arose. In that context, the collapse of a system that later became evident in ’88 took place,” he says.
Mexico 86′ can also be seen in selected theaters in the country until June 5, reported Agencia EFE, a few days before the opening of the World Cup at the Banorte Stadium with the match between Mexico and South Africa, a match that will bring World Cup soccer back to Mexico 40 years later.
Find out more at ‘QueOnnda.com’.