The streaming service that offers gems of Mexican cinema protected by the UNAM Film Library

It was the tumultuous year of '68 and Leobardo López Arretche was studying at the UNAM University Center for Cinematographic Studies.

Students from half the country were mobilizing, fed up with the tight rope with which the PRI governed Mexico, and demanded a change in the system, freedom and an end to state corruption.

There were strikes, demonstrations, takeover of universities, harsh repression and massacres like the one in Tlatelolco.

Among the places where this wave of liberation was experienced the most was in the halls of the UNAM.

López Arretche took advantage of the resources provided by his school and filmed many of those expressions of fed up.

The product of that work is

El Grito

, considered the only film testimony that narrates that revolution from within.

The documentary is part of the collection of the UNAM Film Library - which brings together more than 50,000 titles - whose specialists have restored it and made it available to the public through a streaming service

that

is already an alternative to large companies like Netflix .

López Arretche's is not the only jewel in the Film Library's treasure, but it is possibly the most symbolic.

Not only because it represents a solid testimony of what the students' cry for freedom was - which was joined by intellectuals, professors, workers, housewives, merchants and peasants - but because it survived government repression and censorship.

“The film marks a watershed in the university's film production, because the impact that

El Grito

had was extremely powerful,” says Hugo Villa, director of the Film Library.

Villa remembers that young people of his generation loved the film, which was studied in film clubs, shared on VHS or distributed in pirated copies.

Digitization process of cinematographic material at the Unam Film Library in Ciudad Universitaria on March 5, 2024. Aggi Garduño

The film was restored for the commemoration of the 50 years of the student movement, in 2018, thanks to the magical hands of a technical team that, under Villa's baton, works to rescue Mexico's film heritage.

“The restorations in the Film Library not only try to improve the damage to the material, because naturally many things happen over time, but it also implies making known the era and the environment of the person who directed it,” explains Villa.

Hugo Villa Smythe, General Director of Cinematographic Activities of the UNAM at the UNAM Film Library in Ciudad Universitaria on March 5, 2024. Aggi Garduño

López Arretche's film has gone through a process that seems like alchemy.

It all starts in the Film Library's restoration workshop, a spacious and bright place, where there are mountains of cans that are used to store film rolls.

This is the territory of Ignacio Sánchez, workshop manager, and Manuel Mendoza, restoration technician, who work by carefully verifying each tape.

The men work with zeal, they insert the rolls into a device that stretches the tape and with a special lens they see each frame of the film.

They review the images, repair glues, record damages and point out the special characteristics of the films, in what is a journey through time, to images, spaces and people from other times, immortalized through the lens of creators who captured a piece of Mexican history, both real and fictional.

From this workshop the rolls go to the digitization process, where the images are stabilized, the color is adjusted, the sound is corrected and the deteriorated material is “cleaned”.

Here the technology shines and at the head of the entire team is Gerardo León, a thin man with a friendly smile, who explains that the tapes are placed in scanners that digitize, through what he calls clutter lights, each frame of the film. .

“Here we analyze how the scenes and the frames are.

In-depth restoration work is also carried out to rescue the film material that will be available online,” explains León.

The digitized films are stored in a system known as CLAF, where there are 1,600 titles (52 million frames, 795 hours of digitized material), which can be accessed by experts from the Film Library or by researchers and filmmakers who have permission to consult this heritage.

Films can come from here that will be presented at film festivals, but they do not leave so freely, but rather they have several 'locks' that restrict their use, to avoid piracy and take care of copyright, explains Gustavo Lucio José, head of the Digital Laboratory Department.

Thus, a film can only be presented in a certain city, at a specific time, according to the agreement reached with the Filmoteca.

Not only Mexican jobs are stored in the system, but also from France, Spain, the United States, Canada, Colombia, China or Japan.

Gerardo León, coordinator of new technologies and computing and Gustavo Lucio, head of the digital laboratory. Aggi Garduño

Ruth López, digital process assistant, working on sound correction. Aggi Garduño

Manuel Mendoza reviews material for restoration, on March 5 at the UNAM film library. Aggi Garduño

Jorge Franco, post-producer, works in the correction laboratory. Aggi Garduño

A man works on digitizing material from the film library. Aggi Garduño

Not all of these films are available on the

streaming

service organized by the Filmoteca.

So far there are only 103 titles that represent an alternative for those who want to delve into the history of cinema in Mexico.

This treasure includes works such as the feature film

The Ghost Train

, from 1926, and directed by Gabriel García Moreno, which narrates the misdeeds of some train robbers who spread fear among the inhabitants of Veracruz;

Two Monks

, from 1934, and directed by Juan Bustillo Oro, which is the passionate story of two priests who confront each other for the love of a woman;

or

Tepeyac

, from 1917, by the filmmakers José Manuel Ramos and Fernando Sayago and which narrates the devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe of a young woman who believes she has lost her fiancé in the shipwreck of a ship bombed by a German submarine .

The film “mixes fiction and documentary reality with great ingenuity, allowing us to glimpse the Villa de Guadalupe in 1917 with its popular, religious and pagan customs,” the Filmoteca explains.

This online cinema service also allows you to navigate between materials such as the propaganda with which the Mexican Government called on the population to get vaccinated, footage that narrates social movements or great figures from the era of Mexican golden cinema, such as the actress and director Mimi Derba.

“She was a brilliant filmmaker, but she was also one of the first people who thought about creating film archives,” says Villa.

Among the titles that make those in charge of the Film Library the most proud are those that are part of the cinema of the Mexican Revolution, named intangible heritage by UNESCO.

A restoration technician reviews material in the film library. Aggi Garduño

This Online Cinema service of the Filmoteca not only aims to be a platform to watch films, but also a space where viewers can delve into the history of these creations.

Behind López Arretche's

The Scream

, for example, there is a whole history of persecution and repression.

“The film was not completed until 1971, because Leobardo was arrested and imprisoned in the Lecumberri penitentiary [reported as a torture center] and it was not until he left that the project was concluded.

But even here, at the school, the political police came to harass, they reviewed everything the students were doing, so Leobardo had to work tirelessly and the materials were stored under another title,” explains director Villa.

The film was preserved for decades in the vaults of the Filmoteca, which allowed it to be saved from unfortunate events for Mexican cinema such as the Cineteca fire, which occurred on March 24, 1982, an inferno that lasted 16 hours, during the that the flames destroyed posters, tapes, films (including some by Luis Buñuel) and documentaries, historical documents of cinema, consuming one of the largest film collections in Mexico.

“The journey of this Leobardo film has been long and marks a milestone in cinema,” says Villa.

Thanks to this conservation work by the magicians of the Filmotelca, the film can reach our eyes restored and we can appreciate that wave of freedom that was the student movement of 1968.

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