‘The Kitchen’ Director Alonso Ruizpalacios at BAM: ‘We Need More Trojan Horses’

At a masterclass during the Bogotá Audiovisual Market (BAM), Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios reflected on resilience, co-production and the growing role of artificial intelligence in filmmaking. The session, presented by Mediapro and delayed by an hour after Colombia's World Cup defeat to Switzerland, saw the director address a subdued audience by reading Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art" and drawing on the theme of coping with loss, which he framed as central to both football and a career in cinema.

Ruizpalacios, whose four films including "Güeros" and the black-and-white "The Kitchen" were honoured with a BAM retrospective, discussed the difficulties of financing and distributing non-mainstream work. He argued that international co-production is now the only viable path for such cinema as public funding shrinks, and criticised Hollywood as being at a "breaking point" amid a glut of sequels and reboots. He also outlined upcoming projects, including a Netflix reinterpretation of Carlos Fuentes' novel "Aura" and an adaptation of Yuri Herrera's "The Transmigration of Bodies", a "Mexico City noir" now attached to five co-producing countries.