The little team behind Flowdirected by the vision and effort of Gints Zilbalodis, obtained a monumental achievement in the cinema. In an era of titanic budgets and infinite franchises, Latvia animators converted a game of almost four million dollars into an animated film that has obtained 36 million dollars in theaters around the world, the Golden Globe and the Oscar have taken in its category, it has stolen the hearts of adults and children who went to see it, and now it will convert the Zocalo of Mexico City into a free air hall into a free air hall.
Mexico is one of the markets where it has had the most successful Flow. Until March 2025, according to Varietythe film has raised more than 6.7 million dollars at Mexican ticket offices and has been seen by more than two million people in the country. The achievement is not less when the assistance to cinemas in the country fell in 2024 due to the increase in prices and neither monsters such as Godzilla or King Kong could seduce the audience to buy a ticket.
To celebrate the success, the Ministry of Culture of Mexico City, together with Caníbal Cinema, in charge of the national distribution, organize on Wednesday the projection of the film in the Zocalo of the capital. The event is held to celebrate Children’s day and start at 7:00 p.m.
In addition, the director Zilbalodis will attend, who has landed in Mexico and on the morning of Wednesday he has talked with some media about the love he has received from a country so far and different from his. “It is very exciting that an independent film so small in Latvia has such a great reception in a country like Mexico. It is the beautiful animation and cinema, that its language is universal and transcends borders,” said the filmmaker.
Zilbalodis is shy and introverted. The success of Flow He took it by surprise and so much International attention overwhelms him. “The animators do not usually be public figures, I was used to being alone in my study,” he said. Therefore, after almost a year of traveling around the world, To do interviews and be in projections, I took the time after the awards to rest and prepare your next movie. But when the proposal came to present his film on the main esplanade of the country, “I simply couldn’t say no.”
Despite all the noise he has made Flowthe director sees it as a “very small” film in budget compared to what great studies can do. So do not hide your happiness when talking about how Mexico has reacted to it. “We didn’t plan to go to so many festivals, that people hugged her like this, and less becoming a success in ticket offices,” he said with a laugh. Our country, he said, “had the best response in the world; I hope this continues to create cultural exchanges. Many people had not heard before Latvia and it is beautiful that cinema and art can approach us in this way; I can learn from Mexico and you from my country.”
The Zócalo iron has already housed mass events, such as the Rosalía concert in 2023 or the Firm Group in the independence celebrations of 2022, where, according to official calculations, more than 280,000 attendees arrived. This time, although the expectations are large, only 10,000 chairs will be placed. This will be the greatest function of the film, according to Zilbalodis himself, followed by a southern Korea for 4,000 people.
The film, a lethal, Belgian and French co -production, was praised from the beginning and began its tour around several international festivals, where it won medals such as the Annecy jury award, the world’s largest animation festival, a title that was repeated throughout the year, despite competing with Intensely 2 Disney-Pixar The wild robotanother favorite in the category. Mexico arrived on January 1, 2025 and remained for more than three months in the billboard, until it was displaced in early April by the most recent children’s premieres.
For the director, the film was a way of bringing his anxiety to the screen and fear of working with other people, but also the reward of doing so. Like his cat, Zilbalodis is considered a lonely type, so much that even in 2019, for his first feature film, he became an orchestra man in charge of making until the last detail of Awaywhere in the credits it appears as director, animator, writer and even composer, so Flow He allowed him to live the experience of working with a team that looked nothing like him, but that had the same goal, a kind of parallelism with what happens to the characters in his film.
Mexico and his love for animation
Flow It has not been the only recent animated film to receive the Mexican Apapacho. Since 2024, for example, Hispanic-French My friend Robot Pablo Berger made a success from mouth and raised more than 1.7 million dollars at the box office. This year, MEMORIES OF A SCAKEby Adam Elliot, has obtained more than 110 million pesos. Both were distributed by cannibal cinema, but in an alien case, the newly released adventure of the Looney Tunes, The day the earth explodedhad an unexpected performance with 16 million pesos and saw in Mexico its second best market after the United States.
For Geminian Pineda, director of the distributor, the success of Flow It is a mixture of factors. First, the great reception he had from Cannes and that was replicated when he arrived at the Morelia International Film Festival in October 2024. Then, the success that Caníbal Cine had had with My friend Robot and that served as help for movie theaters to open more space to this type of films: “We realized that there is a large public for animation cinema that is not directed especially for children. Many people are discovering it and it is very nice to see them react to different proposals,” said Pineda.
It was they, from the distributor, who approached the Ministry of Culture of Mexico City to propose the function of April 30. “We think about it as a way of thanking all the audience that supported it and went to see the rooms. We are not thinking of selling tickets, but about bringing more people to know or revive this story.”
