Cannabis Film Festival in Mexico

Far from prejudice, smoke or reddened eyes, the International Cannabis Film Festival of Mexico (FICCA) proposes a lucid and rights-focused look at marijuana through the work of audiovisual creators from around the world.
“It is a festival with social responsibility and focused on the human rights of those of us who are cannabis users,” Iván Librado, director and founder of the event that celebrates its fifth edition this year, told AFP.
Tania Magdaleno, another of the organizers, feels happy and surprised with the evolution of the festival that began in Guadalajara “clandestinely, because we could not announce it” and today even has international guests.
“The people who attend the festival are people who use it but also people who have doubts or who have questioned why marijuana is ‘bad’ and come to inform themselves,” says Magdaleno.
To do this, the festival’s programming has sought to compose an “international perspective” of cannabis “through cinematography”, explains Librado, expressed in different genres and formats such as feature film, documentary, animation, B-series cinema or web series.
With productions from Turkey, Egypt, Uruguay or Mexico, some of which have been exhibited at Cannes, Sundance or Venice, the festival does not put limits on expression although it makes very specific exceptions.
“You’re not going to see drug trafficking, or anything politically correct,” says César Amigo, a programmer at FEICCA, stressing the need to eradicate the criminalization of marijuana and the prejudices around it.
The festival proposes, for example, the documentary “Madre Planta” about the “struggle of the breast farmers of Argentina and Chile” to “improve the quality of life of their sick children”.
Or the web series “Functional Pachecos”, which collects testimonies from marijuana users – called “pachecos” in Mexico – and is committed to “removing the stigma” from the plant and the people who use it, according to its director, Ramiro Medina.
“We tell it beyond the morbidity or taboo of cannabis, or the plant, or the drug or prohibition,” he says.
The celebration of the festival coincides with a greater openness of Mexican society regarding the use of cannabis and seeks to give “a push” so that the legislation is updated on the feelings and habits of the people, says Swald Huerta, also part of the organizing team.
Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized the recreational use of cannabis for adults in June 2021 by declaring unconstitutional articles of the health law that prohibited it, claiming “the right to the free development of personality.”
But after more than a year of the sentence, the Mexican Congress keeps relegated the debate of a law on the matter. We recommend you read: Mexico cradle of cinematography: Eugenio Caballero and Manolo Caro

Original source in Spanish