Festival Film and Social Media from Mexico: Sueño en otro idioma (I Dream in Another Language, 2017) and YouTube’s “Pepe y Teo” (2012-)

What is it about?

This article begins by sketching some key terms in world cinema studies and calling attention to the relative absence of Latin America and of Mexico in those studies. After surveying the Mexican mediascape, it examines two audiovisual works that stake a claim to queerness: Sueño en otro idioma (Ernesto Contreras, 2017) and “Pepe y Teo” (YouTube, 2012-present). While the first is an art movie with a rural, ecological theme, the second is a body of video with a festive and urban character. The article suggests that the former, a locally shot and set fiction feature, is global in its ambitions, aspiring to the status of transnational festival film; while the latter, although appearing to draw on an international register, owes its close connection with a massive audience to its national specificity. Both examples engender, however, an emergent queer culture in Mexico and new and pleasurable senses of the world.

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