‘Roma’ producer pushes craft, artistry amid Mexico’s creative boom

Nicolás Celis. Image courtesy of Pimienta Films.

by Ambika Subra.

Mexico’s film industry has long been a wellspring of creativity, producing visionary filmmakers while remaining just outside the global spotlight. But some sense the center may be shifting. In February, Netflix announced a $1 billion commitment to Mexican productions over the next five years, raising the stakes and highlighting Mexico as a key figure in the future of global cinema. At Pimienta Films - the Oscar-winning production company behind Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and Tatiana Huezo’s Noche de Fuego - that future isn’t simply about making more movies. It’s about making better ones, and building the artistic ecosystems that can carry Mexican cinema into its next era.

Few are better positioned to lead this shift than Nicolás Celis, Pimienta’s founder. Celis has helped define the shape of contemporary Mexican cinema. For him, the current moment is as urgent as it is expansive.

"Mexico is in a very vibrant position right now," Celis tells me. Production is at an all-time high, fueled by fiscal incentives and the influx of streamers setting up bases across Mexico City. "It’s the gateway between this new streaming economy and the rest of Latin America." Major studios are investing heavily - not just in infrastructure, but in securing a foothold in a market that’s growing rapidly in both content consumption and creative output.

But while production services for international films, TV shows, and advertisements are booming, Celis sees a deeper challenge for homegrown cinema. "Ten years ago, there was a huge appetite for Mexican films everywhere," he reflects. "Now, that hunger has shifted to other geographies." The result is a feeling of stasis, a repetition of familiar subjects and forms without a true update that captures the complexity and vibrancy of contemporary Mexico. “Audiences are eager for freshness,” he insists. “An evolution.”

Netflix’s $1 billion investment, Celis believes, won't automatically deliver that. “The money isn’t new," he says. "What’s new is the recognition of just how crucial the Mexican market is.” But quantity alone isn’t the answer. For a company like Pimienta, there’s a different mandate. "It’s not about making more. It’s about raising the level at which we create."

At a time when the industry could easily chase volume, Pimienta is setting a different course: one rooted in craftsmanship, depth, and long-term vision. In a streaming era that favors speed, Celis is holding fast to something rarer. "Films are cultural products, not consumer products," he says. "If you don’t connect with an audience, what’s the point?"

It’s a philosophy that runs deeper than any single project, aiming to rebuild the foundations that sustain great filmmaking. “We have amazing stories and grateful makers,” Celis says, “but we also need to connect the expertise of distributors, exhibitors, and producers. We have to expand the dialogue.” Mexico’s creative industries must grow not just outward but inward - fortifying the artistic community that makes lasting cinema possible.

One of Pimienta’s upcoming projects, Insectario, embodies this vision. Directed by renowned stop-motion artist Sofía Carrillo - who worked on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio - and co-written with screenwriter Mónica Revilla, Insectario isn’t just a film. It’s a showcase of Mexican artistry at every level: animators, writers, designers, and technicians. A stop-motion feature made in Mexico, by Mexican artists, for a global audience. "It’s not enough to make a beautiful movie," Celis says. "We want to build careers, build industries, show what Mexican craft can do."

This is part of a broader shift in Pimienta’s approach, forged in the aftermath of Roma. "After Roma, I understood it’s not only about making a movie," Celis reflects. "It’s about how you position that movie so it can survive the passing of time."

For Pimienta, the future of Mexican cinema doesn’t lie in chasing trends or maximizing output. It lies in doubling down on excellence - making work that connects, challenges, and endures. “Mexico is setting examples for Latin America,” Celis says. “And the only way to guarantee stability is by continuing to make great films, great stories.”

In a moment when all eyes are on Mexico, Pimienta isn’t content to simply ride the wave. They’re shaping the horizon: building an industry where artistry, craft, and connection aren’t afterthoughts, but the foundation.

After Netflix’s billion, the real work begins. And as Pimienta’s vision takes hold, the future of Mexican cinema could be even more extraordinary than its past.

“Horizontal vertigo” and the architecture of Pato

The entrance to Nogal 59. Image credit: Pato

by Ambika Subra.

Juan Villoro now famously referred to Mexico City as a “horizontal vertigo” - a place that unfolds not upward but outward, a labyrinth of nonlinear, magical chaos. To live here is to get lost and found in equal measure. It’s a city where a last-minute lunch can shift your day, where you might follow a stranger into a new neighborhood and come out with a lifelong friend, or find yourself questioning everything because of a particular alleyway.

It was in this horizontal vertigo that I found myself having dinner with a close friend and renowned architect: Patricio “Pato” Galindo Chain.

To understand Pato's architecture is to understand how he inhabits his city. His work - spanning from the boutique Hotel Dama in Mexico City to the retreat Mi Cielo in Valle de Bravo - rarely announces itself with grandiosity. Instead, it collaborates with history, with time, with those who move through it. His motto: “Architecture is precisely the construction of a space by inhabiting it.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in Nogal 59, his residence in Santa María la Ribera. To describe its architecture is to describe the way Pato tells stories, lives in loops, and designs with a sensitivity to rhythm - visual, social, and temporal.

Santa María la Ribera is one of Mexico City’s oldest neighborhoods, a blend of French mansions and DIY repairs, where chaos isn’t an inconvenience but a pattern. On Pato’s street, Calle Nogal, there are no curated storefronts. Instead, rotating clusters of mechanics spill onto the sidewalks like shifting exhibits. Depending on the car parked out front - a cherry-red sedan, a deep green antique van—the light inside Nogal 59 shifts.

This is a feedback loop. Exterior becomes interior. Interior becomes story.

A terrace at Nogal 59. Image credit: Pato

The house itself is a three-story structure designed for one person, but it never feels solitary. “The symphony of the street,” he says, “is a presence I share my space with. It's my timekeeper.” At 6:30am, the smell of burning wood from the tamale vendor cracks open the day. By 11:30pm, a pulsing techno beat signals the arrival of a vendor no one sees but everyone expects. These sounds don’t just mark time, but shape being.

There is rhythm, but never stasis. The vintage tiles, warm woods, and restored furnishings reflect a reverence for the past, but the home exists in fluid motion. It accepts contradiction - modern and antique, open and enclosed.

Sometimes, movement across space requires crossing boundaries: rooftops, windows, time. Pato once had to crawl through a neighbor’s roof to re-enter his own home after being locked out. Another time, a seismic alarm revealed a neighbor’s hidden menagerie - cats, birds, even possums. These moments aren’t exceptions, but extensions of the home itself. When walls become porous, stories seep through.

The kitchen-diner at Nogal 59. Image credit: Pato.

This porousness defines Nogal 59. Plants lean against gridded steel windows. A hallway stretches alongside glass, letting the light shift throughout the day. In a bedroom, a tree outside seems to crawl into the closet. The house doesn’t contain a story, but loops it. The street becomes the house. The house reflects the street. A home becomes a living document of place.

As Villoro might suggest, it’s not just horizontal - it’s vertiginous. Because in that outward sprawl, there’s also deep descent: into memory, collaboration, layered time. To describe Pato’s work is not to list achievements or styles, but to map a way of moving through the world. His architecture is built not just with materials, but with motion, atmosphere, and entanglement. It is an architecture of chaos. And Nogal 59, at the corner of Calle Nogal and everything else, is where the work starts living.

Editor’s Note: A fuller selection of Pato’s work can be viewed via his firm’s website, here.