Jonás Cuarón, the son told to stay out of film who co-wrote Gravity

Jonás Cuarón

Photo: Dulce Osuna / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1981 Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Chupa, Desierto, Aningaaq
Awards	BAFTA (shared) · Hugo (shared) · Ray Bradbury (shared) · FIPRESCI Prize, Special Presentations, Toronto International Film Festival · SXSW Audience Award, Narrative Spotlight

Jonás Cuarón co-wrote Gravity, the film that won his father the Oscar for best director, and his father had told him to stay out of film. “My father always told me not to go into film,” he said in Busan this October, sitting beside Alfonso Cuarón at a joint press conference. He went into it anyway. The more telling part is where he has taken the family trade since: down from orbit, and back to the strip of ground between Mexico and the United States.

His newest film makes that ground literal. Campeón Gabacho, his adaptation of Aura Xilonen’s novel about a young Mexican who crosses the Rio Bravo and ends up throwing punches for money in a Latino neighborhood of New York, is reaching Mexican cinemas before any American distributor has committed to it. A story about a migrant trying to win over the United States is going home first.

Cinema was the household’s working language long before it was his. The son of Alfonso Cuarón and his first wife, Mariana Elizondo, and a grandson of the writer Salvador Elizondo, he was born in Mexico City in 1981 and made his first screen appearance as a small boy at a wedding in his father’s debut feature, Sólo con tu pareja. His uncle Carlos Cuarón writes and directs, and his half-brother Diego Cataño acts. Alfonso says Jonás grew up on his sets, and that he took him to festival after festival while warning him off film school.

So the son studied at Vassar College and came to directing sideways, through photography, shooting stills on French productions before sound and story pulled him further in. His first feature, Año uña, released in English as Year of the Nail, is built entirely from still photographs. His then-girlfriend Eireann Harper had shown him Chris Marker’s La Jetée; he spent a year photographing his own life, Harper and Diego Cataño included, and only then wrote a story to fit the pictures, about a Mexican teenager who falls for an American student renting a room in his mother’s house. It came out in 2007.

That same year he directed and edited The Shock Doctrine, a short companion to Naomi Klein’s book that began when Klein sent Alfonso a copy and he assembled a team around it. Then a father-and-son project, A Boy and His Shoe, lost its funding in 2008, and the two wrote a first draft of Gravity in three weeks. Before they settled on space, they talked through survival in hostile, isolated places. The desert was one of them, and Jonás kept it for himself.

Gravity collected seven Oscars in 2014, best director for Alfonso among them. Jonás shared in the film’s BAFTA for Outstanding British Film with his father and the producer David Heyman, and in its Hugo Award. He also wrote and directed Aningaaq, a seven-minute companion short set in Greenland that shows the other end of Sandra Bullock‘s distress call: an Inuit fisherman who hears a stranger in trouble and cannot understand a word she says. Warner’s home-video arm paid for it as a disc extra. It ended up at Venice and Telluride.

Desierto is where the desert went. Gael García Bernal plays Moises, one of a group of migrants stranded in the Sonoran desert, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Sam, a vigilante who hunts them with a rifle and a dog. Jonás co-wrote, directed and edited it, with Alfonso and Carlos among the producers. It won the FIPRESCI critics’ prize in the Special Presentations section at Toronto in 2015, and Mexico chose it as its entry for the foreign-language Oscar, where it was not nominated. Its American release, held back until October 2016, landed in the final weeks of a presidential campaign in which the border was the loudest subject of all.

The reviews split, and the split describes the whole career. Critics praised the film’s control and faulted its people; the Rotten Tomatoes consensus spoke of a predictable plot and “thinly written characters”. Alfonso sees the same quality as a virtue. His son’s work, he said in Busan, takes on social themes and “strips away unnecessary rhetoric”. Both readings point at one method. Jonás builds political stories on genre machinery, the manhunt, the creature film, the boxing picture, and lets the machinery do the arguing. When it works, the politics arrives without a sermon. When it does not, the people on screen are left as moving targets.

Chupa, made for Netflix in 2023, tried the method on children. A boy from Kansas City visits relatives he barely knows in Mexico and ends up protecting a chupacabra cub from a scientist played by Christian Slater, with Demián Bichir as the grandfather. Reviewers kept reaching for E.T., and Paste called it “friendly, but anemic”. It was also the first Jonás Cuarón film to send its hero south across the border rather than north.

Campeón Gabacho turns him north again, with a lighter hand. Juan Daniel García Treviño, the young lead of Teodora Mihai’s La Civil, plays Liborio, who works in a bookstore for a prickly owner played by Eddie Marsan and sleeps in the loft above the shelves until a street fight, filmed and spread online, pulls him into a boxing gym. Leslie Grace, Rosario Dawson, Rubén Blades and Cheech Marin fill out a cast built to travel on both sides of the border. Alfonso produces, and Mateo Cuarón wrote the score. After the manhunt of Desierto, the film, as Moveable Fest’s critic put it, “takes a softer approach to similar ideas”.

It had its world premiere at SXSW in March 2026 and won the Audience Award in the Narrative Spotlight section. In October it reached Asia in the World Cinema section of the 31st Busan International Film Festival, where father and son shared the stage, and on 16 October it opened the 24th Morelia International Film Festival. Cinépolis Distribución releases it in Mexican cinemas on 29 October.

No American release has been announced. That leaves the last round to the country Liborio fights his way into. Jonás Cuarón has built a career on characters who must prove themselves on the far side of a line; with Campeón Gabacho, the audience still waiting to be won over is the one north of the Rio Bravo.