In August 1896, two Frenchmen showed Porfirio Díaz a moving picture for the first time, then turned the camera on him — making Mexico one of the first countries in the world with a film industry, and Díaz one of its first movie stars.
Movies arrived in Mexico on August 6, 1896, when two representatives of the Lumière brothers gave President Porfirio Díaz a private demonstration of the cinématographe at Chapultepec Castle. A public screening followed a week later at a drugstore on what's now Avenida Madero, showing the same short films that had premiered in Paris the year before. The operators then filmed Díaz himself riding on horseback through Chapultepec forest, the first film ever shot in Mexico, making him one of the earliest heads of state anywhere to be captured on camera. The two Frenchmen went on to shoot roughly 35 short films around the country before moving on; the horseback footage survives today and can still be watched online.
On August 6, 1896, inside Chapultepec Castle, two Frenchmen set up a wooden box on a tripod in front of President Porfirio Díaz, his wife, and his cabinet, and showed them something none of them had ever seen: a photograph that moved. The machine was a cinématographe, invented by the Lumière brothers in France barely eight months earlier. Díaz had just become one of the first heads of state on Earth to watch a movie, and he was hooked.
The men who brought it were Gabriel Veyre and Bon Bernard, and neither of them had planned on a career in film. Veyre had trained as a pharmacist in Lyon before signing on with the Lumière company in 1896, drawn as much by the promise of adventure as by the paycheck. The Lumières were sending operators around the globe that year to demonstrate their invention and sell the novelty before anyone could copy it, and Veyre’s route ran through New York before landing him in Mexico City that August. Mexico wasn’t a destination so much as a stop: over the next four years he’d carry the cinématographe on to Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Japan, China, Indochina, and Canada, and after leaving the Lumière company he’d go on, alone, to screen films for the Sultan of Morocco.
A week after the private show at Chapultepec, on August 14, Veyre and Bernard staged Mexico’s first public screening at a drugstore on what was then called Plateros street, now Avenida Madero, in the historic center. The films were the same two that had premiered in Paris the year before: a train pulling into a station, and workers leaving the Lumière factory. Both were a sensation. But Veyre didn’t stop at showing Mexico films made somewhere else. He turned the camera on Díaz.
The result, El presidente de la república paseando a caballo en el bosque de Chapultepec, ran just sixty seconds: Díaz on horseback, riding through Chapultepec forest with members of his cabinet, cyclists dismounting along the path to watch him pass. It was the first film ever shot on Mexican soil, even though Veyre had to send the reel back to France to be developed. It made Porfirio Díaz, a man who’d spend the next fourteen years running the country by decree, into the country’s first movie star almost by accident, and one of the earliest political leaders anywhere to have his actual movements caught on film rather than just painted or photographed still.
Veyre and Bernard spent the following months shooting roughly 35 short films in Mexico, most of them the same kind of thing: Díaz reviewing troops, Díaz at public events, ordinary street scenes around the capital. Díaz never lost interest. When the two Frenchmen finally packed up the cinématographe and left the country on January 11, 1897, the president showed up in person to see them off, his wife and cabinet with him again, the same way they’d all gathered for that first screening five months earlier. The horseback footage still exists. It can be watched online today, a minute of grainy, silent film showing a president out for a ride, filmed by a pharmacist who happened to be passing through and ended up giving a dictator his favorite new toy.
Sources: Historical documentation of the August 1896 Lumière cinématographe demonstrations in Mexico City, including the private screening at Chapultepec Castle and the public screening on Plateros street, and of Díaz’s personal farewell to the operators on their departure in January 1897; biographical accounts of Gabriel Veyre’s career as a Lumière operator; catalog records for El presidente de la república paseando a caballo en el bosque de Chapultepec, held in the Internet Archive.
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