I have been to countless film festivals throughout the United States. I’ve been to the big (Sundance), I’ve been to the small (Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival) and many that lie in between. I had never been, however, to a relaxed, laid back foreign film festival that was marketed primarily to locals; say what you will about Cannes and Berlin’s festivals, but rest assured that they are not geared toward the French or German citizens. This changed in November of 2004, when I traveled south of the border to the inaugural Puerto Vallarta film festival.
Unlike other beach resorts in Mexico like Cancun, Acapulco and Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta has a fairly intimate connection with Hollywood. Director John Huston became a fan of the area during the forties and fifties and in early 1961 decided to shoot his adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, Night of the Iguana, in and around Puerto Vallarta. While on location, the movie made waves because in a fit of illogic, Huston’s leading man, Richard Burton, decided to fly in his lover, Elizabeth Taylor, for a romantic interlude. "Oh, they were married," a local festival staffer tells me. He grins and says, "Just not to each other." Thanks to their Mexican tryst, Taylor and Burton made headlines across the globe and helped launch Puerto Vallarta’s reputation as a celebrity playground in the sun. After shooting on Night of the Iguana finished, Burton and Taylor purchased a home in Puerto Vallarta, bringing further media attention and dedicated fans to the area. The couple’s purchase spurred other members of the Hollywood glitterati to begin buying houses and land in the vicinity. A Puerto Vallarta population explosion soon followed.
Inspired by the Huston family, the Puerto Vallarta Film Festival views itself, and rather rightly so, as something of a freethinking, independent institution. The festival has even labeled its Best Film and Best Director Awards "The John Huston Maverick Award".
The festival’s indie spirit is obvious throughout the duration of the festival and is one of the event’s most enjoyable quirks. Too often, the festivals I attend are time-sensitive affairs that follow a rigid schedule, more intent on dealing with the business aspects of the film world than on providing moviegoers with a relaxing and pleasant experience.
On rare occasions, filmmakers will talk to audience members in the lobby of the theater after a screening of their movie. With the advent of the fifteen-minute Q&A session, however, these informal conversations don’t happen nearly as often now. In Puerto Vallarta, the special screening of director Alfonso Cuaron’s 1991 film, Solo Con Tu Pareja (Love in the Time of Hysteria), is delayed by half an hour because Cuaron is in the lobby of the theater hob-knobbing with fans, unable to pull himself away to deliver his pre-screening speech. More surprising yet is that there aren’t hundreds of on-lookers crowding around Cuaron in the common area, but roughly twenty people, and that includes me and some of the festival staff.
A teenage employee of the theater notices my festival pass and approaches me. "Do you think it would be all right for me to ask Alfonso for his picture?" she questions, holding a disposable camera in her hand. I look at Cuaron, who is laughing and joking with a middle-aged Mexican woman and her daughter and then back to the girl who asked me the question. "For certain," I tell her. She still seems hesitant and, star-struck, says, "But he directed Harry Potter." "It’s going to be fine," I assure her and give her a small push towards him. Sixty seconds later, Cuaron has thrown his arm around the now beaming girl, handed her camera to one of the nearby festival staff and instructed them to take a series of pictures of the two of them. Some minutes later the girl approaches me again and thanks me profusely for the shove. Cuaron has just made a fan for life.
The dress requirements for the festival events are equally relaxed. While some film festivals have black tie or jacket required dress code for events, Puerto Vallarta’s publicists only inform one when pants are necessary. And even in those rare cases, sandals are still acceptable. One of my fellow journalists attended the awards banquet in a suit jacket and pants, Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops.
When I am introduced to the festival’s director in a bar, I wasn’t wearing shoes. Talking with actor John C. Reilly at the Punta Mita resort, I am wearing a bathing suit and an old T-shirt. Life really is easier like this.
Nestled onto the eastern border of the Bay of Banderas on Mexico’s western coast, the city of Puerto Vallarta is a sleepy burgh with a population of roughly 180,000 people. Unlike census information in the United States though, Mexican demographic figures are very malleable. Several Mexican travel sites list Puerto Vallarta’s population at 250,000, while one, virtualmex.com, has it down at 350,000 people. The festival docent who picks me up from the airport comes at me from the opposite side of things, declaring that there are 30,000 year round inhabitants in town. The United Nations pegs the actual population of Puerto Vallarta at 177,000; seeming slightly more reliable than virtualmex.com and my driver–who explains away our cruising through a red light at 45 mph by stating, "You have to understand, that light hasn’t worked for the last two weeks,"–I go with the UN figure.
While Puerto Vallarta has nearly 200,000 inhabitants, the city feels substantially smaller for a number of different reasons. First, the streets are all extremely narrow, have no lane line markers and are paved with cobblestone–which makes for very bumpy travel. In addition, there are very few American stores present in Puerto Vallarta. If you go to London, Cairo (or even Port-Au-Prince) you will find Burger King, Gap and Disney stores. During my time in Puerto Vallarta, I cannot recall passing one American chain store and, frankly, it’s hard to believe that there is a city of 200,000 people in North America that doesn’t have a McDonald’s in it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an extremely nice attribute, it’s just hard to comprehend.
There are also very few buildings in Puerto Vallarta that are taller than ten stories. Interestingly, the city gets around this latter problem with a very strange labeling system. Though the hotel where I am staying, the Sheraton Buganvillas, has only twelve stories, by some miracle of physics, my room is on the 22nd floor. It’s about midnight when I arrive and, after a long day of connecting flights and humorless flight attendants, when the desk clerk tells me that my room, 2234, is on the 22nd floor, I initially think she’s joking.
"This building is like eight stories tall," I exclaim, "And you’re telling me that I’m on the 22nd floor?"
Adding further confusion to the matter, the desk clerk shakes her head at me and says, "No, senior, the building is twelve stories tall."
When I get into the elevator, it all becomes clear: the second floor is labeled thirteen, the third floor fourteen and so on. Just as some American buildings don’t include a thirteenth floor, some Mexican buildings fail to include floors two through twelve. Though I ask around during my stay, no one can tell me why this is the case.
Because the city is so spread out horizontally, events for the festival take place at many different locations throughout the area. Though the hotel facilities and galas receptions are gorgeous and pristine, I am particularly attracted to the festival’s biggest venue: an outdoor screen in an open square at the end of the Isla Cuale (see the picture on the opposite page, lower right).
The Isla Cuale is a small island–at places no more than 100 feet wide–in the middle of the River Cuale, which runs through Puerto Vallarta. Just imagine a much smaller version of Manhattan Island to get a better feel for the geography of Isla Cuale.
Known for its small local shops, suspension bridges that pedestrians can take to get on or off the island and its large open-air patio, where both the screenings of Night of the Iguana and Shrek 2 were held, Isla Cuale is one of the lesser frequented areas in Puerto Vallarta (see the below photo). Though you won’t learn this from any of the tourist brochures or locals, Isla Cuale is also the stray cat capital of the universe.
While walking through the tree-lined sidewalks of the island with two fellow travelers, I notice more than the occasional cat ducking under a bush or into a flowerbed. At first, I don’t really think anything about it. After another block of walking and another dozen cats, I start counting and realize that there are probably sixty of the mangiest and scrawniest looking cats within a fifty-foot radius of me. The cats don’t bother us, nor do they bother anyone else on the island. They seem, as almost all cats do, perfectly happy ignoring everything going on around them.
Another bend in the path and the walkway opens up into an old, brick-paved common area, surrounded by a series of delightfully well-kept villas that serve as home to a number of local businesses. The film festival’s screen has been erected at the far end of the square and lawn chairs are brought out for the audience members as the actual screenings near.
The few streetlights in the square are dimmed, and the flickering images play out on the nearly two-story tall screen (that’s thirteen stories by Puerto Vallarta standards).
As the crowd begins to file in to the Isla Cuale square, people quickly nab seats for themselves and their friends and their children prior to the night’s film; I’m struck, again, by the beauty of it all. It’s November. It’s 85 degrees outside. The sweet smell of the blossoming flowers wafts down from the surrounding hills and there is a cool evening breeze coming in off the ocean. The sun has disappeared below the horizon in an explosion of reds, yellows and purples and I am getting ready to watch a movie in one of the most rustic, calming and personable settings that I’ve experienced. I’m sure there are some nicer ways to spend a week, but for an adventurous film lover on the prowl, I can’t come up with any better setting than the one I’m in.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE OF STUMPED?
Director Fernando Meirelles
Actress Alison Lohman
Writer/actor Nick Nolte
Director Brian Herzlinger
Director Morgan Spurlock
Actress Bai Ling
Shrek 2 director Conrad Vernon
The Diary of Hollywood Starlet, Rachael Huntley
Hollywood Then (1985) and Now (2005)
Location Scouting in Manhattan
Don't miss writer/director Robert Rodriguez's sumptuous Sin City, writer/director Dan Harris' debut Imaginary Heroes or the rerelease of director Michael Curtiz's epic The Sea Hawk.
Back issues of this magazine are available for purchase.
(c) Stumped, 1998-2006
