MEXICO CITY: After the sadness of having the Mexican Formula One Grand Prix cancelled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Mexico City government has turned its F1 track into a drive-in.
On a rainy Sunday, dozens of people arrived at the fourth circular of the Autodromo Hermanos Rodríguez in Mexico City, which temporarily switched to the Autocinema Mixhuca.
The cinema allows movie goers to maintain social distancing while enjoying exclusively Mexican films.
Juan Manuel Bedwell, an experienced accountant, left the isolation of his circle of relatives to return to a drive-in for the first time in 4 decades, to see the 2013 Mexican film “The Last Call”, a comedy founded on “Caligula,” “a work by Frenchman Albert Camus.
But instead of taking his girlfriend, Bedwell accompanied three young men and three grandchildren this time.
The pandemic “is something we didn’t expect, but we have to get out because if we get locked up, we’ll be more depressed every day,” Bedwell told the AFP.
The new cinema organized through the ministry of culture of the capital and has a capacity of 415 vehicles.
It will open every Sunday and Wednesday until August 19.
The drive-ins arrived in Mexico in the 1950s, but lost popularity and disappeared.
“Because of the pandemic and the need for a ‘new normality’, they have wonderful potential,” said Algiers Gomez, director of primary festivals at mexico City’s Ministry of Culture.
This is not the first transformation of the race track, which has long hosted the most important music festivals in the country, and during the pandemic it also serves as a transit hospital for coronavirus patients.
Mexico is the fourth country most affected worldwide by the coronavirus epidemic with more than 43,000 deaths, and the sixth largest in instances with more than 390,000 contagions among its 127 million inhabitants.
For Ernesto Contreras, director and former president of the Mexican Film Academy, drive-through is “an explanation of why to celebrate” and believes it will be a blessing for the Mexican film industry.
“As we open up these new possibilities, even in the midst of a new alternative, we are winning for our cinema,” he said. – AFP
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