Bernal’s bustling.

With luck, we’ll see some of his new work Stateside.

Gael Garcia Bernal, 29, was the toast of the town during the recent, 31st annual Sao Paulo International Film Festival. He was starring in Hector (“Kiss of the Spider Woman”) Babenco’s darkly unsettling relationship drama “The Past,” presenting another film, the rural Mexican fable “Cochochi,” through the Mexico City production company (Canana Films) he founded last year with his “Y Tu Mama Tambien” co-star Diego Luna, and unveiling his directorial debut, “Deficit.”

In the latter, he leads a cast composed of mainly unknown actors in a story of sexual and class-based tensions that arise among a group of privileged young people in the Mexican capital.

In “The Past,” he’s a cocaine-befuddled translator in Buenos Aires who is torn between three women, each embodying a clashing lifestyle. The shoot in Argentina gave Bernal, who played Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Walter Salles’ “The Motorcycle Diaries,” another chance to commune with what he terms “my second home, my second country,” a place melding many cultures within its identity.

Also on tap for the energetic Bernal are challenging film roles in Carlos Cuaron’s recently wrapped comedy-drama “Rudo y Cursi,” again with Diego Luna; Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness,” with Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo; and the role of the title character in “Pedro Paramo,” Mateo Gil’s adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 magic-realism novella.

 Source