Ale­jan­dro González Iñár­ritu has begun pro­duc­tion on his first film in six years

These mem­o­ries may now feel rather remote, but it wasn’t so long ago that Ale­jan­dro Gonazález Iñár­ritu was on top of the Hol­ly­wood heap. He dom­i­nat­ed the mid-’10s with the back-to-back awards mag­nets of Bird­man (which net­ted Oscars for Best Pic­ture, Direc­tor, and Orig­i­nal Screen­play in 2015) and The Revenant (which scored him anoth­er Best Direc­tor stat­uette just one year lat­er). Aside from the VR instal­la­tion Flesh and Sand, he seemed to have tak­en the rest of the decade off, but that hol­i­day ends now.

Today, the LA Times reports that he’s hard at work in Mex­i­co City on his first fea­ture in six years, revealed to be titled Lim­bo. He and a huge pro­duc­tion team have tak­en over the His­toric Cen­ter of the city for a pro­duc­tion still large­ly under wraps, but suf­fused with nation­al heritage.

Accord­ing to Indiewire, the film will explore the ​“polit­i­cal and social moder­ni­ty of Mex­i­co”, a broad descrip­tion that could mean pret­ty much any­thing in prac­tice. Some­what more spe­cif­ic is an item on The Film Stage, which clocked scout­ing tests last year involv­ing ​’90s wardrobe, appear­ances from card­board cutouts of politi­cians Car­los Sali­nas de Gor­tari and José López Por­tillo, and an actor dressed as the beloved children’s enter­tain­er Pajára Peg­gy.

What has been con­firmed is a hand­ful of excit­ing col­lab­o­ra­tors. Iñár­ritu tapped actor Daniel Giménez Cacho (so great in the recent Zama, soon to appear in Apichat­pong Weerasethakul’s new one Memo­ria) for the lead role, though it has yet to be clar­i­fied what that role is. And he’s also wran­gled pro­duc­tion design­er Euge­nio Caballero (who worked on Roma, the movie this one sounds most like) as well as cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Dar­ius Khond­ji (known for his street-lev­el cam­er­a­work on Uncut Gems).

For his many fans, the return of Iñár­ritu to hope­ful­ly reopened cine­plex­es will be cause for rejoic­ing, but the film­mak­er also inspires a rare degree of antipa­thy in his sol­id fac­tion of detrac­tors. Whether a sign of good things to come or a har­bin­ger of doom, there’s no deny­ing that a new film from AGI qual­i­fies as a major movie event, a sta­tus held by few direc­tors these days.