To celebrate its 25th year the Festival programmed 221 activities between March 12 and 29, 2009. These events featured opera, theater, dance, music, literature, cinema and animation and were enjoyed by more than 200,000 people at 84 venues throughout the city, including the Teatro de la Ciudad, the Teatro Metropolitan, the Lunario, the Espacio Escultórico of the National University´s Cultural Center, the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Plaza de Santo Domingo and the capital’s Zócalo.
This year the festival featured a number of new and special events: the return of Cinema Global, a forum dedicated to world cinema and in particular independent and innovative cinema that finds it hard to gain commercial release; a change in the concept of XCéntrico as a program seeking to take festival events to other districts in the capital; public art, which offered artists the chance to perform in streets and squares and events programmed to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy.
