When
Where
Cinema Tucsón is back for the 2025/26 season with the film screening of The Devil Smokes/El Diablo Fuma
(Ernesto Martinez Bucio, Mexico, 2025, 97 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Set in Mexico City in the nineties, as crowds prepare to welcome Pope John Paul II, the Palacios López children are left waiting for someone who never returns—their mother. While their father sets off in search of his missing wife, the five siblings remain behind under the erratic care of their grandmother Romana, in a household where superstition and fear begin to take root. Winner of the Best First Feature Award at the Berlin Film Festival, Ernesto Martínez Bucio’s remarkable and beguiling debut captures the uncanny blur between childhood fantasy and haunting reality. Mixing the intimacy of home movies with the disquiet intensity of its framing, the film weaves a portrait of a family teetering between devotion and madness, innocence and dread. Elevated by luminous performances from its young, non-professional cast, it is a tender yet unsettling tale of abandonment, belief, and the invisible forces that shape a generation.
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