Mexican film industry facing cuts

The film Y Tu Mama Tambien has been a recent Mexican hit

The Mexican film industry is in turmoil after President Vicente Fox announced proposals to cut arts funding and sell off state-owned film studios.

Writers and film-makers staged a protest outside Congress on Thursday over the president's plans to privatise the Mexican Film Institute, Imcine.

Artists believe the industry will be taken over by Hollywood film-makers should public funding be withdrawn.

Y Tu Mama Tambien and Amores Perros are among Mexico's recent film highlights.

Mr Fox's plans include selling Mexico City's historic Churubusco film studios, which have been used since the 1940s. Film-makers such as John Huston, Luis Bunuel and Emilio Fernandez produced movies there.

This is an attempt to exterminate our national film industry and benefit the interests of the American film distributors National Film and Arts Academy

"We will be left to the mercy and whims of distributors of Hollywood's worst productions," author Laura Esquivel said during a protest meeting.

"It would be ignorant to think that Mexican cinema could really survive without a mix of public and private support," said Esquivel, who wrote the novel Like Water for Chocolate and the script for the 1992 film.

'Bulldozer'

The plan would also cut support for Mexico's CCC film school and another six technical schools, which analysts fear could be broken up or simply closed down if they are sold to private owners.

"This is an attempt to exterminate our national film industry and benefit the interests of the American film distributors," Mexico's National Film and Arts Academy said in an open letter printed in Mexican papers.

"Now that Mexican cinema is making good films, it faces a 'bulldozer' invasion by the US industry, with superproductions that couldn't be more puerile, violent, perverse," said writer Fernando del Paso.

The government has said the arts cuts have to be made to try and simplify Mexico's archaic tax laws.

But critics see it as a conservative attack on the arts legislation brought in in 1920 by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years before Mr Fox became president.