Mexican Lynn Fainchtein Steider, producer, voice-over artist, musical supervisor of films such as Rome either Love Dogsdied early this Friday at the age of 61, leaving a halo of gratitude, generous messages and a trail of hundreds of songs that she chose throughout her career to musicalize the soundtrack of Mexican cinema and many other cultural chapters in the country’s recent history. Close collaborators, writers, journalists, and faithful followers and admirers of her work have mourned the news of her death during the hours after it was announced, through the networks of the company Casete, of which Fainchtein was a co-founder. .
Music was his passion and his job, his way of inhabiting the world. She studied psychology at UNAM, and when she was 18 years old and orphaned, Fainchtein worked in a psychiatric hospital, on the outskirts of Mexico City, where she gave theater classes to women held in that center. At the same time she worked in a pastry shop where, one day on the radio, she heard the newly released station Rock 101, and he knew he wanted to work there. She worked there, as a presenter, presenter and producer for about 10 years, on programs such as Unwinding, Salsabadando either Sonorock, among many others. She was the creator and manager of an AM station called Dimensión 1380 for six years, which she described as a station for “oldies” in which she programmed boleros, rumbas, tangos and danzones. She also had a Christian music program.
Already in the mythical station Rock 101, Fainchtein lived through the time when rock was banned in Mexico, those dark years after the massacre of students in Tlatelolco, when in 1971 the president of the country, Luis Echeverría, decreed the well-known “avandarazo” (in reference to the festival of rock by Avándaro, known as the Mexican Woodstock), a measure that served to outlaw concerts, recordings and radio stations of that genre. “And we suffer from that now, because we don’t have a Charly García or Luis Alberto Spinetta, because the possibility of that type of music was cut off and restricted,” he says in an interview from 2023.
Fainchtein had a musical career that included film, television, radio, journalism and recording. She was head of programming and news producer for MTV LATAM until 2000. As a music supervisor and producer, she worked on films and shows for Netflix, HBO, Amazon, Apple, Fox and Star+, among many of the world’s major studios.
One of his long-running collaborations was with Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu on all of his films, including Bard —winner of the UNIMED Award at the Venice Film Festival and several Ariel awards—as well as The Revenant, Birdman, Biutiful, Babel, 21 Grams and Love Dogs (nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film).
He supervised the musical material of Rome, by Alfonso Cuarón, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, winning Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film (first Mexican film to win), and Best Photography. In 2022, Cuarón invited her to supervise and create the music for his first television series for Apple TV+ titled Augustuswhich will be released in 2024 and will star Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen.
He also regularly collaborated with La Corriente del Golfo, the production company founded by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. He worked on projects like David France’s Oscar-nominated documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, The 33 by Patricia Riggen, Hurray Mexico!The Perfect Dictatorship and Hell by the Mexican Luis Estrada, among others.
In 2023, he collaborated in Lost in the Night, the new project by Amat Escalante, produced by Nicolás Celis. Currently, Fainchtein was collaborating on two productions: the series One Hundred Years of Solitude, based on the work of Gabriel García Márquez, an upcoming premiere on Netflix and produced by Dynamo, and The Bluesproduced by Lemon Studios for Apple TV.
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