A film made out of dissent

Luis Mandoki has been called the Michael Moore of Mexico, a filmmaker whose overtly partisan documentaries preach messages to viewers who are already inclined to believe. But that's not the worst thing his critics had to say of Mandoki's most recent film, which purports to prove fraud in the Mexican presidential election of 2006. One writer compared the director, who is Jewish, to infamous Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, who championed her friend Adolf Hitler in the 1934 film "Triumph of the Will."

Mandoki acknowledges he's a supporter of leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who lost by a hair to President Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN. But he argues there's a difference between producing propaganda and making films with a point of view.

"I'm not doing propaganda; I'm showing a piece of the truth," says the veteran director of Hollywood films such as "When a Man Loves a Woman" and "Message in a Bottle."

Brave truth-teller or cheap political shill? Los Angeles audiences will be able to judge for themselves when "Fraude Mexico 2006" opens here theatrically Oct. 10, following a sold-out screening this week at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival.

Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City who gridlocked the capital with street protests after the election, will be in Los Angeles next week to promote the movie that depicts him as a folk hero. On Tuesday, he's scheduled to participate in a Q&A forum at USC, sponsored by sympathetic Chicano and Latino student groups.

Full disclosure: My relatives in Mexico have been longtime activists for the PAN, the party that came to power in 2000, ending decades of political monopoly and rigged elections. Some have served as PAN deputies in Congress and one cousin has been an aide both to former President Vicente Fox and his current successor, Calderon, who claimed victory with a margin of less than 1 percentage point.

To many on the right, Lopez Obrador was a figure to be feared, someone who would lead the country to socialist ruin. As the movie points out, the candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, was often demonized by the opposition as a populist demagogue, likened to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.