Event

499 a film by Rodrigo Reyes

To reflect on the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 2021,
director Reyes offers a bold hybrid cinema experience exploring the brutal legacy of
colonialism in contemporary Mexico. Through the eyes of a ghostly conquistador, the
film recreates Hernan Cortes' epic journey from the coasts of Veracruz to the Aztec
capital of Tenochtitlan, the site of contemporary Mexico City. As the anachronistic
fictional character interacts with real-life victims of Mexico's failed drug wars and
indigenous communities in resistance, the filmmaker portrays the country's current
humanitarian crisis as part of a vicious and unfinished colonial project, still in motion,
nearly five hundred years later.

Provocative, unique, and strikingly cinematic, 499 mixes non-fictional and performative
elements with elements of the road movie to show how past traumas continue to affect
contemporary reality in Mexico. While linking these seemingly disparate histories of violence, the film confirms Reyes as one of the most potent voices in American independent cinema.