\u201cThis is material that was supposed to be but never was,\u201d the Birdman and The Revenant director says during a late-February preview of the installation.<\/p>\n
![\"Sue\u00f1o](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1772761628_247_image.webp.webp\")
\nPhotograph: Michael Juliano for Time OutSue\u00f1o Perro: A Film Installation by Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu
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A cornerstone of contemporary Mexican cinema, crime drama Amores Perros follows three human (and canine) stories bound by a car crash in Mexico City. (It\u2019s worth mentioning that dog fighting plays a pivotal role in the film, though at LACMA you\u2019ll see some of the behind-the-scenes tricks that kept the production cruelty-free.) Though I\u00f1\u00e1rritu shot more than a million feet of film, the final cut, which clocks in at two hours and 34 minutes, occupies about 18,000 feet of celluloid\u2014a mere rounding error in comparison.<\/p>\n
I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u00a0assumed these miles of leftovers had been thrown away; after all, film is expensive to store. But by some miracle, producers M\u00f3nica Lozano and Tita Lombardo had left these cans upon cans of reels to the archives of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. And so 25 years later the director found himself revisiting this unexpected exhumation of his early career\u2014like an old friend he\u2019d never met before\u2014a process he found both liberating and melancholic.<\/p>\n
![\"Film](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1772761629_530_image.webp.webp\")
\nPhotograph: Courtesy Karol PruzinskyWork in progress still of \u201cSue\u00f1o Perro.\u201d
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\u201cI found some of these scenes very moving. To see [star] Gael [Garc\u00eda Bernal] so young, and the city with the clothes and the cars [of that time] and with no service to any narrative, but just themselves,\u201d he says. \u201cOr seeing [the late] Emilio Echevarr\u00eda\u2026 I said, \u2018this is beautiful.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The largely narrative-free footage on display at LACMA looks much as it did straight out of the camera: Clapperboards open each scene, retakes roll right into each other and the open gate nature of the filmstock means that microphones and crew members are sometimes visible along the edges of the uncropped images. Splicing all of that old footage into something new felt like, in I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u2019s words, unfreezing the placenta of a 25-year-old baby, where \u201cyou take the DNA and put it together and it comes alive in a certain way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then I\u00f1\u00e1rritu started tinkering with the technical, sculptural side of the installation while he was in London shooting Digger<\/a>,\u00a0his upcoming comedy with Tom Cruise. He procured three projectors from an exhibitor, staged some curtains and smoke, and started photographing the in-the-works setup. The first iterations of \u201cSue\u00f1o Perro,\u201d which debuted last fall in Milan and Mexico City, had a labyrinthian multi-room layout. But here in L.A., the six scenes converge in a single (sort of sweaty) gallery\u2014the very same one where he screened the virtual reality short Carne y Arena<\/a>\u00a0in 2017. \u201cI think this is the paranoid version, because everything attacks you at the same time,\u201d I\u00f1\u00e1rritu says of the single-room LACMA layout. The loud, intense car crash scene rattles the air. Strips of celluloid whisk around every corner of the room and into three-decade-old commercial projectors, which occasionally glow orange as the scratched-up ends of the film feed through. Everything in here feels sculptural: the mechanical appreciation of the aging projectors, the painted white walls that serve as screens and the seemingly tangible, conical beams of light that pierce the darkness\u2014in one scene where window blinds cast horizontal shadows across Gael Garc\u00eda Bernal\u2019s face, you can admire the alternating ribbons of light that emanate from the lens.<\/p>\n The result is a very nonlinear, all-at-once impression of the film, a reassembled puzzle of \u201cfragments of those times in a very different city, a very different time, of a different me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe other day, one person was telling me, I love it because it\u2019s the way you remember films,\u201d I\u00f1\u00e1rritu says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s true: When you remember a film, you don\u2019t remember a film completely\u2014you remember moments. And this is like snippets, like fragments of the memory. So this is how I feel when I remember a film.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSue\u00f1o Perro: A Film Installation by Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu\u201d is on view in the first floor of LACMA\u2019s BCAM building through July 26, 2026. Access is included in a general admission ticket, which costs $30 ($25 for L.A. County residents). Locals can also visit for free<\/a> on weekdays after 3pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019re not supposed to stare at an eclipse, but nobody ever said anything about projectors. Because how often…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[50946,48,52,51,47,50,49,1399,50947],"class_list":["post-206540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-categories-movies","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-movies","tag-news-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Sue\u00f1o](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1772761629_561_image.webp.webp\")
\nPhotograph: Michael Juliano for Time OutSue\u00f1o Perro: A Film Installation by Alejandro G. I\u00f1\u00e1rritu
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