A Mexican feature film depicting the religious Cristero War of the 1920s has received its world premier at Toronto’s International Film Festival.
French-Mexican director Matias Meyer based “Los Ultimos Cristeros” on the book of the same name by Antonio Estrada, son of the last Cristero colonel, Florencio Estrada.
“I wanted to vindicate the struggle of the Cristeros because there is a widespread misconception that they were religious zealots manipulated by the clergy. The Cristeros took up arms independently, it was a popular movement made up mostly of peasants who did not want to lose their religious freedom,” said Meyer.
The Cristero War began when, facing religious persecution in post-revolutionary Mexico, thousands of Christians and Roman Catholics rose up in a counter-revolution against the new government.
“It’s a film about the struggle for religious freedom just like any other freedom,” the director said, noting that he made the film not necessarily to defend the Catholic Church, but to rescue a part of Mexico’s history.
The director was advised by his father, the French historian Jean Meyer, who wrote definitive accounts of the Cristero rebellions.“The movement of the Cristeros was an important part of the history of Mexico. While 30,000 men rose up with Francisco Villa and some 20,000 with Emiliano Zapata, Cristero forces coalesced to 50,000 men,” said Meyer Senior.
The movie was filmed on location in Guanajuato and Jalisco, where many key episodes of the Cristero War took place. Jalisco became a focal point of the rebellion, with resistance particularly strong in the Los Altos region in the north of the state.
The first instance of violence broke out in Guadalajara on August 3, 1926, when around 400 Catholics barricaded themselves in the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Eighteen people were killed and 40 injured in the ensuing firefight with federal troops.
The war claimed at least 90,000 lives before U.S. Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow brokered a peace agreement between the two sides in June 1929.
In 2000, Pope John Paul II canonized 25 saints who were martyred during the Cristero War, 17 of whom were from Jalisco. Previously beatified in 1992, the majority were Roman Catholic priests executed for carrying out their clerical duties.
Only those who did not take up arms could be honored as martyrs. They will receive further recognition in the Martyrs’ Sanctuary currently being built on the outskirts of Guadalajara.
“Around ten movies have been made on the Cristeros, all ridiculing them. That’s why I wanted to make a different movie,” said Meyer, taking questions from the audience after the screening.
Asked how the film will be received in Mexico, the director felt that “it will shed light on a largely unknown historical period in the country that is not given sufficient publicity, a terrible civil war that few are aware of.”