The 18th Annual Hola México Film Festival is happening in Los Angeles: September 25 – October 3, 2026. This is an opportunity to experience the best of contemporary Mexican cinema during Hispanic Heritage Month. Founded in 2008, Hola México Film Festival has grown into the largest Mexican film festival outside of Mexico. Every year, audiences discover award-winning films, emerging voices, celebrated filmmakers, and unforgettable cultural experiences in the heart of Los Angeles. The primary venue for the Hola México Film Festival is the Regal L.A. Live Theatres, located at 1000 W. Olympic Blvd. Los Angeles, 90015.
All films are in Spanish with English subtitles. Tickets for most films are $15.00. Regular Festival Pass is $229, which includes access to all 20 films, plus Opening Night + rooftop after Party (21 & Over) with complimentary food & drinks after screening and Closing Night + Concert (21 & Over).
The Opening Night of the Hola México Film Festival will be at the historic Montalbán Theatre in Hollywood. After the screening, there is a celebration on the rooftop at the official Opening Night After-Party (21+), featuring complimentary food and drinks with filmmakers, special guests, and fellow film lovers under the Hollywood sky.
The Opening Night film is a very entertaining comedy entitled Loco México Mágico directed by Carlos Santos. An eccentric mayor decides to turn Alvarado, Veracruz, into the next great tourist destination by making a Hollywood-style movie. Armed with plenty of enthusiasm, very little money and absolutely no experience, he assembles a colorful crew of local residents, led by a videographer who normally films quinceañera and is suddenly promoted to director. Between improvised special effects, oversized ambitions and that unmistakable Mexican ingenuity, the entire town must come together to get this wonderfully chaotic production onto the big screen. Tickets still available for Opening Night can be purchased for Film Only ($30.00) or Film + After Party (21+) ($62.50).
Some of the films in the line-up are: Juana, a dramatic thriller directed by Daniel Giménez Cacho and starring Diana Sedano. The investigation is led by Diana Sedano in a visceral and unpredictable performance. The film follows a woman discovering what silence has cost her and the price of facing the truth about herself. At 45, Juana has spent more than a decade surviving a terrible memory in her life from ten years in the past that she thought she had buried: She has to deal with Pedro Núñez, a corrupt politician connected to a criminal network and to the murders of her boyfriend and a fellow journalist. Times: Saturday, Sept. 26, 2:30 pm; Sunday, Sept. 27, at 7:30 pm – at Regal Cinemas LA Live.
En El Camino, directed by David Pablos and starring Inna Payán, Luis Salinas, and Diego Luna. It takes place in northern Mexico along endless highway and truck stops where homosexual hook-ups occur. Veneno, a rebellious young drifter, survives through roadside diners and fleeting encounters with other man. Desperate for a ride, he persuades Muñeco, a guarded long-haul trucker, to take him across northern Mexico. In a world of engines, truck stops, unspoken rules, hard-edged masculinity and danger that never feels far away, their uneasy companionship slowly becomes an unexpected intimacy. But with every mile, the ghosts of Veneno’s past draw closer and threaten the fragile refuge the two men have found in each other. “En El Camino” screens on Saturday, September 26 at 7:15 pm; and Monday, September 28, at 7:10 pm – at the Regal Cinemas LA Live.
La Peluca is a satiric comedy (only 65 minutes long) written and directed by Emiliano Rocha Minter. The main character Silvestre has spent seven years trying to make a three-hour epic about Benito Juárez. All he needs is money. Unfortunately, the millionaire who invites him to pitch the project has plans of his own. Ricky’s country house is less a meeting place than a trapdoor into the absurd: a surreal garden, a perpetually naked stranger, an ex-girlfriend, a lawyer with opinions about Silvestre’s divorce, and waiting like a sacred object, a blond wig said to have belonged to a nineteenth-century Florentine poet.Once the wig goes on, the pitch begins to mutate. So does Silvestre.
Emiliano Rocha Minter’s twisted meta-comedy turns artistic frustration, money, ego, and reinvention into a cinematic prank that keeps changing shape beneath our feet. With tactile grain and mischievous shifts in format, language, and tone, “La Peluca” is both a satire of filmmaking and a celebration of the strange freedom that arrives when the movie we dreamed of gives way to the movie we can actually make. “La Pecula” screens at the Regal Cinemas LA Live on Saturday, September 26 at 5:30 pm; Sunday, September 27 at 9:50 pm.
Sobriedad, Me Estás Matando (Dear Sobriety,You’re Killing Me), directed by Raúl Campos is a a sharp and unexpectedly tender dark comedy about addiction, privilege, friendship, and the panic of realizing adulthood may have arrived without you. Octavio Hinojosa plays Raffi with the charisma of a man capable of turning every consequence into a story about his own misunderstood brilliance, while the film considers whether reinvention begins with becoming someone new, or finally seeing the person everyone else has been dealing with. Sobriedad screens at the Regal Cinema LA Live on Wednesday, September 30, at 9:35 pm; Thursday, October 1 at 7:15 pm.
El Jardín Que Soñamos (The Garden We Dreamed) directed by Joaquín del Paso is film about cultural displacement experienced by Haitian refugees in Mexico. Esther and Junior, a Haitian couple traveling north with Esther’s daughters, Flor and Aisha, find temporary refuge in a remote forest in central Mexico. There, beneath the path of migrating Monarch butterflies, they create a fragile world of tenderness, play, and possibility. But as illegal logging closes in and the weight of Junior’s past begins to surface, Esther must hold the family together while the forest around them is slowly torn apart. This film screens at the Regal Cinema LA Live on Sunday, September 27 at 7:30 pm; Monday, September 28, at 5:00 pm.
Flamingos: La Vida Después Del Meterorito is an 83-minute documentary by Lorenzo Hagerman about the thousands of Caribbean flamingos gather in a shallow estuary every year on the northern edge of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The flamingos arrive seeking to find a mate, build a nest, and bring a new generation into the world. Their courtship can be graceful, awkward, and unexpectedly funny. Their survival is anything but simple. Water disappears. Heat presses down. Storms tear through the colony. Predators wait for the smallest mistake. Narrated by Julieta Venegas, co-written by poet Ajo, and carried by an original score from Bryce Dessner of The National, the film transforms natural history into an intimate story about love, risk, parenthood, and collective resilience. Flamingos screens at the Regal Cinema LA Live on Wednesday, September 30 at 7:20 pm and on Thursday, October 1, at 5:15 pm.
Memoria De Los Olvidados is a historical documentary by Javier Espada about the making of Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, filmed on the streets of Mexico City in 1950. In Memory of the Forgotten, filmmaker and Buñuel scholar Javier Espada returns to the places where the landmark 1950 film was made, guided by a remarkable discovery: nearly one thousand photographs Buñuel took while searching for locations, preserved for decades in an unassuming shoebox.
Through Arturo Ripstein’s unmistakable voice and conversations with Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michel Franco, Ofelia Medina, Elena Poniatowska, Juan Villoro, and many others, the documentary moves between cinema history and the city that gave the film its pulse. Along the way, it uncovers Goya’s influence on Buñuel’s imagery, explores the director’s experience as an exile in Mexico, and considers why a story created so long ago still feels painfully contemporary. The documentary screens at the Regal Cinemas LA Live on Tuesday, September 29 at 7:30 pm and Thursday, October 1 at 5:00 pm.
This is also fine opportunity to revisit Buñuel’s Los Olvidados which will screen on Wednesday, September 30 at 5:00 pm; and on Friday, October 2 at 5:00 pm.
