Gabriel Gutiérrez Morales’ ‘Tijuana, Todavía’ has secured a position in competition at the Venice Film Festival’s Queer Lion category. The production was developed through the Biennale College – Cinema program, which provided a €200,000 budget and a 10-month timeline to develop, write, produce, shoot and complete the film. Producer and star Humberto Busto noted that while the financial constraints were unusually tight for Mexican cinema, they created a focused and rewarding creative experience.
The narrative centers on two male characters in Tijuana: Maksim, a young queer man who fled Russia to avoid military conscription during the Ukraine war, and Chava, a middle-aged gay man confronting Northern Mexican cultural attitudes toward masculinity. Gutiérrez drew inspiration from his own experiences growing up in Tijuana and personal connections formed while living there, including a long-standing online friendship with a gay man from St. Petersburg. The filmmaker emphasized that the border town setting was intentional, noting that media coverage often portrays the border as a conflict zone while rarely depicting it from perspectives of residents or those seeking refuge there.
The casting process yielded a notable alignment between fiction and reality. Actor Petr Filimonov, cast as Maksim, is himself a Russian refugee who fled after opposing the Ukraine war and facing persecution for his sexual orientation. He had been studying acting in Russia for four years before relocating to Mexico. During his interview, Filimonov reportedly expressed emotional recognition of the character’s journey as parallel to his own experiences.
Additional real-life connections emerged during production. A refugee shelter featured in the film, Casa de Luz, was founded by a woman whose personal history echoed the film’s narrative—she had developed a relationship with a Russian man at the shelter, subsequently spent months pursuing him across multiple countries after his deportation, and reunited with him just days before filming commenced. The project stars Miry Rodríguez, Dilan Rivera, Elliot Roy Rensky and Jorge Domínguez Cerdá, and is produced by Fosfo Producciones and distributed domestically by Colmena.
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