Choosing cinema as a risk rather than a comfort becomes an ethical stance. For Mauricio de la Maza-Benignos, filmmaking is not an industry or a profession: it is a necessity. He does not film to explain himself or to please; he films because there is something to say, and cinema – as a language – offers him the possibility of communicating what, he insists, makes him uncomfortable, and finds no other means of expression. “I don’t go around searching for a shoulder to cry on,” he said. In his cinema, that phrase translates into a clear will: to communicate from his own scheme, to follow his passion to its ultimate consequences.
Mauricio de la Maza-Benignos:
Reserved personally, but free-spirited in his ideals, De la Maza-Benignos moves in a constant tension between containment and overflow. That duality runs through his work and finds a deep root in his interdisciplinary training. He graduated summa laude with a PhD in Biology at UANL; has an MBA from Lancaster University, United Kingdom; a BSc in Agricultural Engineering from Monterrey Tech; a LLB with Honorable Mention of Excellence from TecMilenio, and a MA with Honorable Mention of Excellence in Cinematographic Art at the Ilumina School of Cinema. Far from being an ornamental accumulation of credentials, this formative architecture configures his gaze: to observe without rushing in, to record without domesticating, to expose processes without imposing meanings.
“We are primates,” he says, and in that phrase an artistic ethic is condensed: disruption should be natural. We should not be scandalized by a naked body dancing in the forest or an image that breaks the expected order. Transgression is not an empty pose or provocation; it is origin. In his cinema, there is no desire to re-order the world, but to show it in its most fragile and contradictory state.
That impulse can be clearly perceived in his early works, particularly in the short films El Ciudadano and El Bonito, where observation becomes a form of relationship with the world. Cinema works like a laboratory: observing, waiting, allowing reality to reveal itself, without forcing it. There is no urgency for narration or a fixed narrative structure, but sustained attention to what happens on the margins. The gesture is almost scientific, but never cold. There is a sensitivity that seeps into every frame, a restlessness that refuses to remain neutral.
Before cinema, there was Science and Law. Two fields that, far from being abandoned, continue to operate as structures of thought in his work: Law in its philosophical dimensions. The environment and Human Rights, due to their ethical and political charge. His experience as Director of NGOs reinforces a critical relationship with the world that is not contemplative. To observe, record, and expose: these actions replace any temptation to indoctrinate. De la Maza-Benignos does not film to explain or justify anything, but to communicate a worldview, cross-cut by what bothers him, what hurts, and what cannot be articulated from a rational discourse.
In his transition to feature filmmaking, his cinema evolves. The observation elements remain, crossed by new elements: the absurd, the bizarre, the incursion of situations that break the everyday logic. This is what happens in Cora, his third feature film, which deepens in his most recent one, The Shoe, where the cinematographic language expands into even more radical territories. It is not a whimsical turn, but an expansion of language. The absurd appears as a tool that allows him to manifest the unspeakable, to detonate other possible realities: borderline images, practical resources, moments of transgression that disarm the viewer’s expectation and force him to look again.
His cinema does not seek stability or comfort. It is built on risk. From breaking with conventional narrative structures. There is no interest here in pleasing or in offering closed answers. On the contrary, his work asks an uncomfortable question that cuts across the social and political dimensions: How did we arrive at this polarization? At what point did barbarism become a landscape? What does it mean today to talk about inclusion in a context where violence seems normalized? The question is not stated directly, but runs through every image, every formal decision.
For De la Maza-Benignos, cinema is a space of fissure: a place where the image can say what verbal language does not reach, where the body, gesture, and absurdity become tools of thought. His commitment is clear: not to explain the world, but to expose its cracks; not to order chaos, but to allow it to manifest.
“Ultimately, everything returns to its origin.” For him, cinema is not a professional goal or a destination, but a way of existing in the world. Like a child who takes crayons to experiment, filming is an act of constant exploration. His work challenges the viewer’s expectations, not to mock him, but to disarm him. Understanding how we got here—this violence, this polarization—requires viewing things differently. And in that gesture, cinema once again becomes a risk. A language. A necessity.
-Marisa Lovet.
Cultural journalist
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