Guillermo del Toro Said a Film Festival Is Exactly the Right Place to Protest After Students Called Out Guadalajara’s Six-Year Water Crisis

Guillermo del Toro arrived at the 24th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival to mark two decades of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” one of the most celebrated Spanish-language films ever made. The weekend took an unexpected turn when a group of student protesters stood up at the end of his master class on Sunday, October 18, and turned the room into something closer to a public hearing about a water crisis that has been building in Guadalajara for six years.

Six Years of Contaminated Water and a Government That Kept Making Promises

The crisis in Guadalajara did not start with the protests that erupted this October. It started in 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, when residents across the metropolitan area began reporting that the water reaching their homes was murky, yellowish and smelled wrong. Neighbors in areas like Del Fresno, Miraflores, Colinas de la Normal and Jardines Alcalde described water that arrived with dirt and mud suspended in it, and in some cases carried the smell of sewage. The damage extended to household appliances, made cooking and cleaning difficult, and affected personal hygiene in ways that residents described as unsustainable.

One resident in Miraflores had an independent water analysis conducted in May 2020 through the microbiology laboratory at the Center for Research and Assistance in Technology and Design of the State of Jalisco. The results showed the water was not fit for human consumption, registering 16 million total coliform bacteria, 3.5 billion fecal coliforms and 130,000 E. coli per 100 milliliters. The state’s own health risk commission, Coprisjal, took samples in two of the same neighborhoods and reported that three out of four tests found no coliforms at all, a discrepancy that did little to reassure people who were living with the problem every day.

The water authority, known as SIAPA, initially blamed the pandemic for the deterioration. The agency told the Jalisco State Human Rights Commission that maintenance on storage tanks had been postponed to avoid supply interruptions, and that water traveling through open canals at Atequiza and Las Pintas was arriving already contaminated with municipal discharges and agricultural runoff. A resident in Miraflores who said the water had destroyed the filtration system of a pool his daughter used for rehabilitation therapy filed a property claim against SIAPA that the agency denied in July 2020.

Six years later, the complaints had not stopped. Jalisco Governor Pablo Lemus publicly acknowledged the crisis and announced that the old Chapala system feeding the Las Pintas reservoir would be suspended for at least six months, with water service redistributed through a rationing schedule. Five days after that announcement, roughly 10,000 people marched to Casa Jalisco to demand clean water and were met with water cannons and gas to disperse the crowd. The confrontation left 58 people injured among civilians and police, and 39 people were detained before later being released.

Students Used His Platform and He Welcomed It

The protest that reached del Toro’s master class on October 18 was part of this broader wave of demonstrations against the municipal government and Governor Lemus. Inside the festival venue, a student took the floor and addressed the room directly. She said that students in Guadalajara were bathing in black water, that they were sick, that they were being poisoned, that they could not eat properly, and that local authorities had done nothing to fix it.

Del Toro did not deflect the moment or redirect attention back to the film. He responded to the students in front of the audience, which also included Daniela Michel, the director of the Morelia International Film Festival. He said that people often argue that spaces like these are not the right place for protest, but that he disagreed entirely. He asked the room: if not here, then where?

A Homecoming That Became a Conversation About Power

The exchange gave the festival a dimension that a straightforward anniversary celebration would not have had. Del Toro’s willingness to validate the interruption, rather than treat it as a disruption, drew attention precisely because these moments in public cultural spaces often get managed away rather than acknowledged. His response made clear that he saw no contradiction between honoring a film about resistance and allowing students to exercise it in real time.

The festival also presented del Toro with the Silver Medal of the Filmoteca of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, known as the UNAM, in recognition of his career. The honor came during a conversation with press and fans in which he reflected on the two decades that have passed since “Pan’s Labyrinth” first screened, a film set against the backdrop of post-Civil War Spain that has only grown in stature since its 2006 release.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” follows a young girl named Ofelia who escapes the brutality of fascist Spain through an elaborate fantasy world, and its twentieth anniversary is an occasion the Morelia festival treated as worthy of a full master class, a media conversation and a major institutional honor. Del Toro, who has spent much of his career working between Mexico and Hollywood, has remained one of the most prominent Mexican voices in global cinema, and the Morelia festival used this edition to make that legacy explicit while his hometown continued demanding something far more basic than recognition.