Fernando Eimbcke
filmmaker
Update: 5 October 2011
Contents
Publications
With just two feature films under his belt, Fernando Eimbcke has become one of the key figures of Mexican cinema: he is young, immediate, a renovator, with his finger on the pulse of authenticity and an awareness of the power of the image. Eimbke studied film at the University Centre for Film Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 1992 to 1996. He began his career making music videos and also made a series of short films, one of which, La suerte de la Fea....a la bonita no le importa (The Luck of the Ugly Woman… the Pretty One Doesn’t Care), won the 1st National Competition for Short Film Projects, from the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE) in 2002. His feature debut, Duck Season (2004), was the revelation of Mexican cinema that year. It was screened at the Guadalajara Festival, the Critics’ Week at Cannes, and was nominated for the Independent Spirit Awards. The film won critical plaudits and a whole host of prizes, including 11 Ariel Awards from the Mexican Film Academy. In the film, Eimbcke shows the dramatic power of small actions through this portrait of adolescence featuring a series of characters «who may not know what they want, but are perfectly aware of what they don’t want », to quote the director. Following this success, he was invited to take part in the Sundance Institute’s Writers and Directors Labs, where he worked on the project for his next film Lake Tahoe (2008). The film tells the story of a teenage boy trying to come to terms with the loss of his father as he tries to find someone to help him repair his car. During his journey he encounters, in a series of semi-static vignettes, a world of gently funny, yet absurd, disoriented beings, who help him understand the meaning of death. The film was widely acclaimed by the international media and won the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize and the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlinale that same year. In 2010, Fernando Eimbcke took part in the omnibus film Revolución, together with the leading Mexican directors of the new generation.