With his long-time collaborator, the Mexican photographer Gabriel Figueroa, director Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández created a new cinematic language; a unique nationalistic style that aimed to break away from films that, the director believed, were derivative of other national cinemas (particularly of Hollywood). Fernandez’ alternative Mexican cinema was rural, folkloric and traditional, and sought to construct a new Mexican identity. “There only exists one Mexico”, the director famously stated, “the one I invented”.
The director’s popularity was not limited to home shores: between 1945 and 1949 he won a string of important awards, including multiple Ariels (Mexican cinema’s equivalent of the Oscars), as well as major prizes at international festivals like Cannes, Venice, Locarno and the Golden Globes in Hollywood. This, then was a vision of Mexico that resonated both within Mexico and abroad.
Maclovia was the Fernández’ thirteenth film, and his fifth collaboration with the screenwriter and playwright Mauricio Magdaleno, editor Gloria Schoemann and photographer Figueroa (the four had made the Palme d’Or winner María Candelaria, four years previously). Featuring art direction by Spanish emigre Manuel Fontanals (who worked on over two hundred films in Mexico between 1940 and 1972), the film boasts the same principal cast as the director’s most famous film, Enamorada, and stars Fernández’ own wife Columba Dominguez in a supporting role. Set on the indigenous island of Janítzio, in the state of Michoacán, and inspired by Carlos Navarro’s 1935 feature Janítzio, in which Fernández’ starred, it is the story of the ill-fated love between the poor José Maria (Pedro Armendáriz) and the beautiful Maclovia (María Félix). It is a film that focuses on the Mexican indigenous population and its traditions, which the director saw as a vital aspect of the country’s collective identity and its cultural inheritance, particularly in the march towards modernity.

Daniela Michel e Chlöe Roddick