Asalto al cine, the Mexican director Iria Gómez Concheiro’s first feature about four teenagers who decide to solve their financial problems by robbing a cinema is set in her home town, but she claims that it is a situation that could happen to youngsters anywhere in Latin America.

She confesses that she combined two ideas when she wrote the script: the problem of the lack of educational and job opportunities for the young whom often drift into crime and a news story she read about some youngsters who robbed a cinema and got away with it.

Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala, on the other hand, takes a look at a much darker side of crime.A young girl’s obsession with winning a beauty contest leads her to get mixed up in a war between rival drug gangs. Naranjo stresses how it has really polarised its audience: “some people think we are betraying our country; others think it is the first step on the way to solving this problem.”