Tijuana todavia trailer and Venice premiere
What the Tijuana, todavía Trailer Places in View
A film about migration can easily be flattened into a story about movement from one border to another. The trailer for *Tijuana, todavía* seems more interested in what happens when people are left in place, waiting, improvising, and trying to build some form of trust. Directed by Gabriel Gutiérrez Morales, the film follows a queer Russian asylum seeker and a gay middle-aged man in Tijuana, with its world premiere scheduled for September 5 at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.
A border city without the usual shorthand Tijuana is often used in film as a threshold, a dramatic edge between two countries and two possible futures. That framing can make the city feel like scenery for someone else’s crisis. The premise here suggests a different emphasis: the city is where these two men have to live, not merely pass through. That distinction matters. Waiting is not empty time when housing, legal status, money, language, and safety are all uncertain. It is a daily structure.
The relationship is the more interesting premise The trailer’s central pairing also avoids making the asylum seeker the only person whose life is treated as unsettled. A queer Russian migrant and a gay Mexican man may have very different histories, but the film appears to place them in a relationship where neither person can be reduced to a symbol of tolerance or exclusion. The useful question is not whether one character rescues the other. It is whether companionship can exist without erasing unequal vulnerability.
Venice gives it a particular kind of attention A world premiere at Venice will put the film into a festival conversation that often rewards stories about displacement, identity, and political borders. That attention can help a small film travel, but it can also encourage viewers to approach it as an issue rather than as a work of cinema. I am curious whether the finished film keeps the texture suggested by the trailer: the awkwardness of two people negotiating closeness, and the ordinary details that make a temporary place feel inhabited.
The trailer is now available through The Hollywood Reporter en Español’s report on *Tijuana, todavía*. I may be missing context until the full film is shown, but this looks less like a border thriller than a study of the social arrangements people make while official systems leave them waiting.