Documentary film festival Ambulante, set up last year by Canana, the production company founded by Mexican actors Diego Luna, Gael Garcia Bernal and producer Pablo Cruz, will open today with Oscar-nominated Jesus Camp.

The second edition of this travelling film festival will tour 15 cities in Mexico until March 29. 'Our goal is to give the people the chance to see documentary films from all over the world on commercials screens, to bring them to places where they are rarely seen,' said Elena Fortes, the festival's director.

This year's programme includes Bajo Juarez, which competed at Sundance; La Palomilla Salvaje, which won top awards at the Morelia and Mexico City film festivals; and international documentaries including An Inconvenient Truth, 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, The Road to Guantanamo or This Film Is Not Yet Rated.

This secondn festival, which expects to improve the success of the first one with 12,000 tickets sold, offer three new sections: Injerto, a series of experimental documentaries, Dictator's Cut that bunch together documentaries that have been censored, and Witness, a section born from the collaboration with the organization founded by singer Peter Gabriel, which uses the power of video to open the eyes of the world to human rights abuses.

Ambulante will also carry out a documentary post-production workshop in collaboration of the Institute of Cinematography. Canana is also working on getting DVD and TV rights to the selected documentaries for Mexico.

In 2006 Ambulante manage to cross the border by bringing a series of Mexican documentaries to the National Film Theatre in London, the Viva Film Festival in Manchester and the Muestra of Nuevos Realizadores in Havana. This year, a Spanish expansion is planned.

The idea of this festival came out when Bernal and Luna realized that their friend Eugenio Polgovsky, who directed Tropico de Cancer, couldn't find distribution for his documentary despite all the prizes it won. 'There has been a growing interest in documentary filmmaking over the past few years. The main problem is that documentaries lack distribution. They are considered a risky business. But we do believe that the audience is there,' explained Garcia Bernal.

Exhibitors Cinepolis will host the travelling festival as it continues to promote documentaries distribution in Mexico.

The price of a festival screening ticket will be $3.18 (35 pesos), cheaper than the usual price of $4.55 (45-50 pesos), and the benefits of the sales will be divide between the film-makers, Ambulante and the exhibitor.

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