MUSEUM

Gael García Bernal heads up this Berlinale Silver Bear winner (for Best Screenplay) that tells the story of Mexico’s most infamous museum heist with exciting brio and wit.

Juan is a feckless, 30-something veterinary student who still lives at home with his parents. With his equally indolent best friend Wilson, Juan cooks up a get-rich-quick scheme to steal a collection of priceless Mesoamerican artefacts from the National Museum of Anthropology, and then sell them off to the highest bidder. But Juan hasn’t factored in Mexico’s collective pride in its heritage, and the subsequent national outrage at the theft makes it all but impossible to sell the art.

Loosely based on a true story, Alonso Ruizpalacios’ sophomore feature (following his Berlinale 2014 Best First feature-winning Güeros) is a playful combination of buddy comedy, heist thriller and family drama as well as a damning commentary on cultural appropriation disguised as preservation. Gael García Bernal and Leonardo Otizgris are wonderfully believable as the likable losers at the centre of the action, and Damián García’s beautifully fluid cinematography fills each scene with saturated colour and verve.

"Made of dazzle and wit and melancholy, Alonso Ruizpalacios’ fabulously entertaining Museum spins an irresistibly inventive and unusually intelligent tall tale … It’s not every director who could take Hitchcock, Looney Tunes, Rififi, The Doors and Bresson in his bouncy stride but Ruizpalacios pulls it off with a joyful sureness." – Variety