Gabriel Gutiérrez Morales made a film on a pittance. Working with a production budget of €200,000 (just $234,000), the Mexican director wrote the screenplay and production schedule in a mere three weeks. The result, "Tijuana, Todavía," now competes at the 83rd Venice Film Festival in the Queer Lion category, one of cinema's most prestigious honors for LGBTQ films.
The film tells the story of a gay refugee fleeing persecution, tracking his journey to Tijuana at the border between Mexico and the United States. It's a subject matter that carries particular urgency in the current moment. Anti-LGBTQ violence has intensified across Latin America, and the Americas face a refugee crisis with no clear resolution. A film centered on queer displacement speaks directly to lived crises facing millions.
That Gutiérrez Morales could produce something festival-worthy under such severe constraints speaks to his discipline as a filmmaker. The European production grant forced efficiency, not frivolity. He worked fast. He worked lean. He worked focused. These are the conditions under which strong storytelling often emerges. In the absence of bloat, every scene must carry weight.
Venice's Queer Lion award recognizes the year's best LGBTQ films. The category has become one of the festival's most watched sections, drawing international press, streaming platforms, and distributors hungry for stories that represent queer lives with nuance and political stakes. Previous winners have gone on to significant distribution deals and festival runs across North America, Europe, and beyond. A win or even nomination here can reshape a film's trajectory.
"Tijuana, Todavía" enters a competitive field. The 2024 Venice lineup reflects a global uptick in films addressing migration, displacement, and queer identity simultaneously. These films treat LGBTQ people not as afterthoughts or side characters but as central protagonists navigating systems designed to exclude them. That shift matters. It signals that festival programmers, critics, and audiences increasingly demand films that marry identity politics with urgent social realism.
Gutiérrez Morales joins a lineage of Mexican filmmakers who have used genre and border narratives to examine power, vulnerability, and survival. His work arrives at a moment when Mexico itself has become a flashpoint in international conversations about asylum, violence, and safety. The country hosts significant refugee populations fleeing gang violence, political persecution, and yes, homophobic violence from criminal organizations that actively target queer people.
The film's presence at Venice also reflects how European funding has become essential for Latin American cinema. Mexican filmmakers often depend on co-productions and grants from European institutions to finance their work. This particular film's European financing enabled its rapid production and its path to one of the world's three most important film festivals alongside Berlin and Cannes.
Venice runs through September 7, 2024. The Queer Lion winner will be announced during the festival's closing ceremony. Beyond the prize, the real question centers on distribution. Which platforms will acquire "Tijuana, Todavía"? Will it reach theaters in Mexico, the United States, and Europe? Will it find the audiences whose lives it depicts? For a film made on such a tight budget with such speed, the work of storytelling is only beginning.