The Black Legend of Mexican Cinema(2016)

The Black Legend of Mexican Cinema is a documentary that traces a pivotal moment in Mexican film history. In 1950, filmmaker Miguel Contreras Torres led a public campaign against William O. Jenkins' monopoly on the country's cinema theaters, an empire built on crime and corruption. Though ridiculed and later erased from memory, Contreras Torres's stand marked a watershed for Mexican cinema and its audiences. The film excavates his forgotten works and writings—particularly his manuscript "The Black Book of Mexican Cinema"—to recover a suppressed history. By restoring these moving pictures to view, the documentary resurrects a story nearly lost to time, one that Contreras Torres himself fought to preserve and pass down.