Documental Ambulante A.C. is a non-profit organization founded in 2005 by Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna and Elena Fortes. It is committed to supporting and promoting documentary film as a tool for social and cultural change. Ambulante brings documentary films and training programs to places where they are rarely available in order to foster a cultural exchange, encourage a participative, informed and critical attitude in our audience, and open new channels of expression in Mexico and abroad.
Each year, in collaboration with Cinépolis, and the Morelia International Film Fest, Ambulante organizes an international film festival that tours Mexico for two months. We present over 100 documentaries and hold screenings in over 150 venues. Ambulante promotes documentary films all over the country. The tour seeks to expand the traditional exhibition circuits in Mexico, beyond the commercial venues, in order to reach different groups.
We also have screenings, workshops, meetings with filmmakers, seminars, industry panels, documentary theater, drive-in screenings, and a series of documentaries in the Ibero-American Festival of Musical Culture Vive Latino. Ambulante is currently the largest documentary festival in Mexico and a unique exhibition space in the world. The festival is non-competitive and offers more than 60% of its programming for free. Since its first edition, the festival has grown more than 610%.
On the other side, the training department of Ambulante, Ambulante Beyond, aims to train new filmmakers from different corners of Latin America, who have limited access to the necessary tools to share their stories with a broad audience. Through modular workshops, Ambulante Beyond promotes independent filmmaking to ensure that these stories are told from a cultural and aesthetic perspective –not arising from the imposition of conventional film parameters.
To discover, share and transform the world through its stories.
To construct together a more critical, empathic, open and engaged society.
To promote a documentary film exhibition model that is replicable in diverse contexts, in order to reach and create new audiences that are participative and critical, by means of multidisciplinary activities for diverse sectors of society, prioritizing communities with little access to documentary film.
To discover new talent, and to promote the training of Mexican filmmakers and the exhibition of their work in the national and international market.
To generate a more critical attitude in society towards its surroundings; to invite all those who will come to the screenings with us to inhabit a close or distant reality, which becomes crucial in the moment of watching films in community, and which demonstrates a relationship beyond the screen.
Audience meets the characters of Lucha México