by the El Reportero’s news services
Carlos Mijares Brach
Mexican architect Carlos Mijares Bracho was honored at an event this weekend in Mexico City for his work on religious and public buildings using the traditional bricks known as “xamixcalli.” Some 200 people took part in the event Saturday at Mexico City’s Christ Church, the Anglican church considered most representative of his style.
Artes de Mexico magazine editor Alberto Ruy Sanchez praised Mijares as a “great architect, thinker and teacher” who has the ability to create modern works using pre-Hispanic construction materials.
Mijares, who was born in 1930, considers bricks a “symbol of life” and uses “this baked object” in a “simple way, prefabricated with earth, water and fire,” giving the material “new uses,” reinventing it and employing it in a creative way, Ruy Sanchez said.
Mijares’s architecture has “achieved greatness with such a simple and common material, something used so commonly,” Spanish-born Mexican artist Vicente Rojo told Efe, referring to the architect’s use of bricks.
Rojo, who founded Artes de Mexico in 1953, said Mijares’s work had “very special value” because he was a creator who was not “in the dominant line.”
Mijares’s best known buildings, other than Christ Church, are the Perpetuo Socorro Church in Ciudad Hidalgo and several houses around Mexico City, such as the Diaz Barreiro house.
Mijares also designed the Baleares project in Bogota, Colombia, with architect Carlos Campuzano.
Mexican actor satisfies his childhood desire to bullfight in new movie
When he was 11 years old, Spanish-born Mexican actor Daniel Gimenez Cacho went to his first bullfight and was absolutely fascinated.
Now at 51 his dream has come true, even though it’s on film in Spanish moviemaker Pablo Berger’s “Blancanieves”(Snow White), which won thunderous applause Friday night at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
The father of some friends of mine took me to my first bullfight when I was 11 years old and I loved it. I told my parents I wanted to do that. But they said no, I wasn’t to learn that,” the winner of four Ariel Awards, the highest honor in Mexican cinema, told Efe.
In this atypical take on the Snow White fairy tale, being silent and in black and white, Spanish and about bullfighting, Gimenez Cacho wears a “suit of lights” to play the father of the Brothers Grimm heroine, a character almost invisible in other adaptations.
“He’s a very striking character, whose drama begins when his wife dies giving birth to their daughter on the same day he is gored by a bull,” he said.
But the pain and his physiacal disability put him in a wheelchair from where he observes, tenderly but stoically, the changes in his daughter, the victim of manipulations by a stepmother with the features of Maribel Verdu, with whom he worked in “La Zona” (The Zone).
The son of Spanish parents and born in Madrid, Gimenez Cacho attributes his passion for bulls to “a nostalgia for being Spanish, being the son of emigrants,” for which movies have been a great compensation since “Blancanieves” marks another milestone in a career of Spanish films, having worked previously with Pedro Almodovar, Vicente Aranda, Agusti Villaronga and Joaquin Oristrell.
