Associated Press

MEXICO CITY—“Y Tu Mama Tambien” stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna hosted a gala dinner Aug. 11 to raise money to support human rights and shine light on poverty and injustice in Mexico.

The $300-a-plate meal in Mexico City benefited Mexico’s Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights as well as Witness, an organization founded by singer Peter Gabriel that promotes the use of video and film to document human rights abuses.

“Documentaries show us the injustices in the country where we live, that this problem exists,” Garcia Bernal told a news conference before the dinner.

Luna and Garcia Bernal, who recently launched the Canana production company, also want to use documentaries to raise awareness about failures of the Mexican judicial system, including the unsolved murders of more than 300 women in the northern city of Ciudad Juarez.

“Each day it’s harder to live in this country and in this city” and turn a blind eye to the poverty and injustice, said Luna, who recently premiered his directorial debut “Chavez.”

The actors have vocally backed other social and political causes such as Mexico City’s new law legalizing gay civil unions. Garcia Bernal also has criticized a U.S.-Mexico border fence as “absurd.”