LETTER FROM MEXICO

Whatever happens next in director Jacques Audiard's career, there's a good chance he'll never film Mexico again. The country has become a nightmare for his musical Emilia Pérez, which won numerous awards at Cannes and the Golden Globes and hopes to collect some Oscar statues on March 2. Its theatrical release in Mexico on January 23 coincided with its 13 Academy Award nominations, making it the most nominated non-English-language production of all time. This avalanche of European and American awards provoked an even greater wave of condemnation in the country.

Mexicans criticize many aspects of the musical. First, there are the actresses' accents and mistakes in the way Mexico is depicted. Then there's what is deemed as the misleading portrayal of the sexual transition of a drug trafficker into a human rights activist, and the simplistic vision of the missing people crisis, a national tragedy, which they feel was handled too lightly by a foreigner.

"He did use Mexico's reality to talk about drug trafficking, missing people, trans identity, but he did so without documenting himself and without respect for these sensitive issues. I'm not saying that a foreigner can't talk about Mexico. The film Super Nacho [by American director Jared Hess, 2006] is the most stereotypical comedy about Mexico in the world, and the country loves it," said trans activist and filmmaker Camila Aurora on her Instagram page.

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