His masterclass started an hour late after Colombia’s FIFA World Cup clash with Switzerland went to penalties, leaving the opening-day crowd at the Bogotá Audiovisual Market (BAM) visibly deflated over its eventual loss. Taking the stage before the subdued audience, Mexico’s Alonso Ruizpalacios acknowledged the collective disappointment by turning to Elizabeth Butcher’s poem One Art.

“I found refuge in it when Mexico lost, too. I’ll read it and see if it speaks to you the way it does to me,” he said, before reciting the poem in full, which begins:

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”

“I’m not much of a soccer fan—I swear, I’m really not—but I’ve had to become one because of my sons’ obsession with the game. And I think one of the most valuable things they’ve learned through it is how to lose. How to lose with grace,” he went on.

“It strikes me as an incredibly important lesson, because losing is far more common than winning,” he said, adding: “I think that’s certainly true in filmmaking as well. For me, one of the greatest lessons has been learning how to lose: accepting that a film won’t always meet your expectations, that you won’t win a grant, that you’ll have to start over and try again. It’s about becoming resilient. I suppose that’s something you gradually acquire over the years.”

Speaking to Variety before his BAM Talk, presented by Mediapro, Ruizpalacios talked about his upcoming adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’ novel Aura for Netflix. “I’m approaching it not as a literal, page-by-page translation of the novel to the screen, but as a reinterpretation of it.”

On his adaptation of another novel, The Transmigration of Bodies by Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, which he deemed “one of the finest novelists writing today,” he said: “It’s set during an epidemic – a fictional one – but it inevitably brings COVID to mind, even though the novel was written before the pandemic, it turned out to be almost prophetic.”

“But it’s an epidemic of sadness—of something that’s never quite defined. Against that backdrop, the story unfolds as a kind of chilango noir—that is, a Mexico City noir. It’s deeply rooted in the atmosphere and character of Mexico City.” Presented at the Berlinale Co-Production Market earlier this year, it already has five co-producing countries attached, he said, naming Spain, France and Chile among them.

Reflecting on his four movies, which BAM was honoring with a retrospective, starting with his career-launching “Güeros,” he mused on what he calls his ‘problem child’, the black & white “The Kitchen,” which was “challenging from start to finish.”

“Raising the financing was especially hard. It took many years. We’d finally get someone on board, and then the deal would fall through. Filming was difficult too, because coordinating actors from different parts of the world and bringing them together in one place was incredibly complicated. We had everyone together for a month before shooting began—we spent an entire month rehearsing. Making that happen was difficult, but it was something I really wanted: for the entire cast to rehearse together before filming.” Finding distribution in the U.S. was even more of a challenge, given its immigration theme, he added.

Speaking about co-production at his BAM Talk, he said: “I think it’s simply the reality of filmmaking today. Every time you watch a film now, the opening credits list co-producers for what feels like 10 minutes. It’s just the way things are – there’s no getting around it.

“There’s something fundamentally right about working that way. We’re no longer living in a time when public funding alone could finance an entire film. Those funds are becoming smaller and smaller, so you have to piece together financing from different sources. There’s also something deeply stimulating about that process. It’s the only way to survive if you’re making non-mainstream, non-hegemonic cinema. If a streaming platform isn’t paying for your film, this is the only viable path.”

“It’s also the only way to stand up to dominant commercial cinema, which, honestly, I think is at one of its lowest points. I genuinely believe Hollywood cinema has reached… a breaking point,” he said, lamenting the abundance of sequels, spin-offs, reboots and the like.

Asked what he thought about the thorny issue of AI and its creeping dominance, he said: “First, I genuinely love what I do. I love writing. That’s why I find this rush toward artificial intelligence unsettling. As a tool, it’s perfectly fine. But this wholesale embrace of it – the almost frenzied enthusiasm – strikes me as dangerous. It feels like we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.”

 “What AI doesn’t really account for is that the point isn’t only the result—the point is the process. That’s what the human experience is. The human experience lives in the process. I love sitting down to write. I love searching for exactly the right word, rewriting a sentence, opening a thesaurus, flipping through a dictionary of synonyms, and finally finding the precise word I’m looking for. That process gives me pleasure. So, this obsession with efficiency – with the bottom line – doesn’t interest me at all. I don’t think life is about saving time. Saving time for what? The whole point is to spend it doing what you love.”

He called for more independent cinema as “almost an act of resistance.”

“We can’t simply make films that only cinephiles will watch. I think we have a responsibility to engage audiences – to help re-educate them, in a sense. That’s incredibly important.”

“What we need are Trojan horses,” he pronounced. “I’m a great believer in the Trojan horse. By that I mean what Martin Scorsese has described about Hollywood directors of the 1940s and 1950s. Many of them were European filmmakers who came with genuine artistic training and a real artistic vocation, but they found themselves working within the entertainment industry. So they had to smuggle anti-establishment ideas, political thought and complex artistic content inside the framework of commercial entertainment.”

“I think we need to create more Trojan horses today—works that can exist within streaming platforms, for example. I even fantasize about making a film for TikTok someday: a movie you would watch in 15-second episodes that gradually builds into something larger. I don’t know exactly what that would look like, but I think there’s something worth exploring there, he said, adding: “I no longer think it’s enough to make contemplative films, however beautiful they may be. I love those films – they’re a refuge for me – but I think we also need to find new ways of reaching people where they already are.”

The 17th BAM edition runs over July 6-10.