CDMX MOVIE CLUB

Like a book club but for movies.

Newcomers and locals in Mexico City to forge friendships, share experiences, and create lasting connections. Bilingual.

After 20 meet ups here is a recap. Join us!

We started with Roma in Roma.
CLASS & CONTEXT
In Roma, we talked about family and class—who is part of a family, who serves it, and how those lines can blur. That took us to Parasite, where class became the central question, with people literally and socially living above and below one another.
That day, a Korean person joined us and helped us think about how much understanding and communication depend on language and cultural context. That took us to Arrival, where communication itself becomes the question: can we truly understand someone whose language and way of seeing the world are completely different from ours?
In Arrival, we got into the continuous loop of time and space—if you knew what was coming, including the pain, would you still choose the life? That took us to Everything Everywhere All at Once and Children of Men, two very different movies about possible futures, despair, and ultimately choosing hope and meaning when things feel broken. MOTHER, FAMILY & WHAT WE INHERIT
In that discussion, the concept of the Mother came up—archetypal and otherwise—which took us to La Teta Asustada, where we talked about generational trauma and the brokenness that can be inherited from the people and history that came before us.
That led to Los Olvidados, where trauma, poverty and circumstance shape children and raise the question of how much choice and agency anyone really has over who they become.
AGENCY & CHOICE
After the heaviness of that movie, we wanted a reset. But the question of agency stayed with us and took us to Ex Machina: can something created and controlled by someone else become its own being and make its own choices?
From there—and for Valentine’s Day—we went to The Lobster, where humans technically have choice, but society has created rules around something as personal as love.
LOVE
Love then took us to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: if love brings pain, would you erase it—or would you choose the whole experience again?
That led to Interstellar, where love and connection are tested across enormous distances and time. We talked about agency and self-fulfilling destiny, which took us to Stranger Than Fiction, where knowing that your time may be running out forces the question of whether you’re actually living your own life.
IDENTITY & BELONGING
That week, there had been protests about gentrification in CDMX, and they became part of our discussion. That took us to Blindspotting, where, against the backdrop of gentrification and the changing identity of Oakland, we talked about the duality between how you see yourself and how the world sees you.
That opened into Sinners, which carried the Oakland connection through its director and took us further into race, culture, history, identity and belonging.
WOMEN, FAMILY & THE BODY
We talked about whether Sinners was properly classified as horror, so we followed the horror thread to Huesera. But Huesera also brought us back to something we’d been discussing since Roma: family, motherhood and the tension between who you are and who you’re expected to be. We talked about the sacrifices we make for family.
That took us to The Quiet Girl, where family became less about who is supposed to love you and more about what care actually looks like.
From care and vulnerability, and still exploring women’s experiences, we went somewhere much more uncomfortable with Fat Girl—into sexuality, desire, power and how we look at bodies. That movie was jarring, and going into the new year, we again decided we needed a bit of a reset.
REALITY
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema changed the conversation: instead of only discussing what we were seeing, we started asking why we see movies—and reality—the way we do.
Žižek’s use of The Matrix as an example took us directly there, and into the question of reality itself: if what you experience feels real, what makes it real?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?
The Matrix then gave us the bridge into The Last Temptation of Christ. Neo is framed as a kind of messianic figure, and his choice is between the painful truth and the comfort of illusion. So we turned the question around: what if Christ were offered his own blue pill? What if, instead of suffering and fulfilling his divine purpose, he could choose an ordinary human life—love, family, comfort and mortality?
That took us to The Last Temptation of Christ, where the temptation isn’t simply sin; it’s the possibility of choosing an ordinary human life over the divine one.
From there, A.I. Artificial Intelligence turned the question around again: if the divine might long for an ordinary human life, what happens when something artificial longs to be human? A.I. also brought us back to themes we’d explored before—love, parenthood and whether love is created, chosen or simply exists.
Finally, Wings of Desire gave us another outsider looking toward humanity: an immortal being who can observe everything about human life but ultimately decides that actually living it—with its love, pain, limitation and imperfection—is worth choosing.