Los Cabos 2018: Terry Gilliam, Spike Lee, Adam Driver Visits Indicate This Might Just Be Mexico's New Top Festival

Let’s face it, and maybe some day it will happen, but right now Mexican film festivals won’t have the year's biggest world premieres. Hence, they rely -- in terms of film programming -- on national, maybe Latin American premieres. That’s just fine, we should appreciate their efforts, and when said screenings come together with the visit of a cinema titan, well, that’s quite simply as good as it gets in this country.

In that sense, the Los Cabos International Film Festival blew the roof off yesterday by announcing the final details of its upcoming seventh edition. Master filmmaker Terry Gilliam, who really needs no introduction, is heading to Los Cabos to receive a well-deserved homage for his “Exceptional Contribution to Cinema History.” If that wasn’t enough, Gilliam’s latest, his once cursed project that took decades to become a reality, certainly the highly anticipated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, is having its Mexican premiere at the festival. Gilliam will present as well one of his classics, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and offer a conversation about his career, moderated by Mexican writer Juan Villoro. 

Another one of the all-time greats, Da Republic of Brooklyn’s own Spike Lee, will receive the exact same honor at Los Cabos. Lee’s latest, the exceptional, funny and pertinent BlacKkKlansman, will be shown, for the very first time in Mexico, during the festival’s closing gala. A special screening of Lee's quintessential work, Do the Right Thing, and a conversation with the filmmaker, conducted by his longtime collaborator Roger Guenveur Smith, are also part of Los Cabos' tribute. 

And do you know who’s the actor that appears in both The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and BlacKkKlansman? Well, Adam Driver, who has become one of the most interesting performers of his generation, working with the likes of Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Jim Jarmusch and of course both Terry Gilliam and Spike Lee, is going to be honored by Los Cabos for his “Outstanding Work In Cinema.” That’s a pretty impressive lineup of guests if you ask me.

Aside of that, Los Cabos also confirmed Yorgos Lanthimos’ new effort The Favourite, starring Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2018 Venice International Film Festival, as the opening night film. Other movies added to the festival’s fantastic program include Jacques Audiard’s western/comedy The Sisters Brothers, which stars John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix, and Jonas Åkerlund’s Lords of Chaos, the film adaptation of the book of the same name that tackles Norway’s crazy black metal scene from the early nighties.

The seventh edition of the Los Cabos International Film Festival is going to be celebrated from November 7 to 11.