A Tequila Brand’s Short Film Finds Magic in Mexico City

Most tequila brands lean on celebrities and glossy commercials. Polanco Tequila chose cinema. Its short film QUERIDA, directed by Santiago Sierra Soler and shot on 35mm in Mexico City, has already won festival accolades and stands out not as marketing, but as art.

The story follows a shy office worker, stuck in routine yet yearning for love and adventure. His path shifts after a tarot reading predicts a transformative encounter. Soon after, inside the legendary Barba Azul dance hall, reality bends. Music surges, shadows stretch, and for a fleeting moment he locks eyes with the bartender—as if the prophecy has taken shape in real time.

Mexico City itself is portrayed with equal weight—alive, chaotic, vulnerable. The film lingers on queer and trans communities, on neighborhoods vanishing under gentrification, making QUERIDA both a love letter and an elegy.

Polanco’s presence is never heavy-handed. There are no bottles in focus, no slogans. Instead, the film embodies the brand’s ethos: tequila that respects tradition, values patience, and honors culture. Just as agave takes nearly a decade underground before harvest, QUERIDA lets moments breathe. It’s layered, deliberate, and unapologetically authentic.

For Polanco, the decision to back a film like this is strategic and poetic. The brand isn’t chasing the party-shot demographic. It’s positioning tequila where it belongs: alongside fine wine, whiskey, and—now—cinema.

By the time the credits roll, what lingers isn’t a product placement. It’s a feeling—the shimmer of destiny in a crowded room, the pulse of a city in flux, the warmth of a spirit that asks to be savored. Polanco reminds us that tequila, like film, is meant to be experienced, not consumed.