Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu: director without borders

This article seeks to question and revise the boundaries of Mexican National Cinema, in order to make it possible to look at films made by Mexican directors in the United States and elsewhere as part of the project of the country's national cinema. The article looks specifically at Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu's trilogy (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel) exploring not only how these films, although made in different countries and political contexts, share many of the same visual, stylistic and narrative strategies, but also what this might suggest about the possibilities of a resistant and contestatory cinema, made in the United States but still broadly adherent to the concepts of a Third Worldist, and specifically Mexican, culture and ideology.