And Your Mother Too

With Y tu mamá también, released in 2001, both Alfonso Cuaron and Gael Garcia Bernal really made a name for themselves. It is a road movie about two kids, thirsty on life, and their first real encounter with the grown-up world. It also has a strong political undercurrent, set in a contemporary Mexico characterised by social unrest and by a political take-over by the conservatives after years of leftist hegemony.

Bernal plays Julio, who comes from a progressive middle class family. His girlfriend is travelling in Europe, so he goes on a car trip with his friend Tenoch, whose family is more upper class, with the goal of living life, taking drugs, and hitting on girls. Then they meet Ana, a beautiful grown-up woman who has been abandoned by her husband and find the two young boys charming.

Y tu mamá también was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and the film elegantly balances fierce naturalistic dialogue scenes with the use of an all-knowing narrator who comments the film through voice over puts the events on screen in an historical perspective. The film is erotic and life-affirming, but it also has a tender and melancholic tone that stems from the realisation that nothing, not even a human life, can last for ever.

Alfonso Cuaron (b. 1961) is a director, screenwriter and producer from Mexico. His filmography spans films as different as Children of Men, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azbakan and Gravity, which won him an Academy Award for Best Directing in 2014. Cuaron studied at the film school CUEC in Mexico City, where he also started his collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.