Macuil
Jael Jacobo
México, 2019, 4:20
Electuario: Plantas para el duelo
Marcela Cuevas
México, 2024, 3:54
Ñores (Sin Señalar)
Annalisa D. Quagliata
México, 2016, 2:53
Desaparecer
Elena Pardo and Manuel Trujillo
México, 2017, 4:13
Canto a un dios robot
Bruno Varela
México, 2025, 4:57
La cuarta plantación
Azucena Losana
México, 2020, 12:37
Monte Tláloc
Mariana Dianela Torres
México, 2023, 1:44
Neon cortex
Bruno Varela
México, 2023, 13:56
Yaa Ye’e: Deidades de cuarzo
Biznaga Audiovisual
México, 2024, 20:19
Ajá
Dennis Noel López Sosa
México, 2022, 5:28
Total: 74 mins
Salón de Cines Múltiples
Post-screening Discussion: Byron Davies
Macuil
Jael Jacobo
México, 2019, 4:20
Macuil - Hand / Five, Humanity-Gods-Demons-Hands-Spirit. The creation with the hands in the history of humanity, from the first men who carved on rocks to advanced civilizations in search of the representation of spirituality.
Jael Jacobo is an architect and audiovisual creator. She bases her work on memory and ancient art, using animation, video mapping, expanded cinema, as well as analog and experimental cinema as a form of expression, in addition to the intervention of space and manipulation of light. She has carried out performances in Mexico, Canada, Peru, and the United States, and her short films have been screened in different festivals around the world, such as in Spain, Chile, Brazil, Turkey, France, Serbia, the United States, Uruguay, Hungary, and Bulgaria, among others. She has also taught animation workshops at various cultural centers and universities in Mexico City, including the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) and the Universidad Iberoamericana.
Electuario: Plantas para el duelo
Marcela Cuevas
México, 2024, 3:54
Cinema poetry about grief, composed of autobiographical and alchemical elements from the palingenesis theory of Paracelsus. Super 8 format intervened on using several techniques including pigmentation with menstrual blood.
Marcela Cuevas is an intermedial artist and cultural manager. She has studied photography, psychology, stage design, and the anthropology of art. She works in the areas of experimental film, creative writing, therapeutic accompaniment through art, performance, stage design, and community video. Her work has been presented in different museums, cultural spaces, and festivals in Mexico and abroad, including in Australia, the U.S., Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Canada, Uruguay, Paraguay, Spain, Chile, and Bolivia. She is co-director of the film therapy project Consultorio de Archivo Vivo; she also collaborates with La Yerbabuena audiovisual network and is part of the collective SACIMU in Oaxaca. She is interested in art as a device for making visible relations between social and emotional problems, and also as a tool for creating support networks. She has been a beneficiary of the Young Creators grant awarded by FONCA (Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts).
Ñores (Sin Señalar)
Annalisa D. Quagliata
México, 2016, 2:53
Ñores (Sin Señalar) (Misters (without blame)) reminds us that Mexico is a country where the ones pointing to and denouncing the corruption and impunity are silenced. The main focus of the piece is the murder of reporter Rubén Espinosa, activist Nadia Vera, Alejandra Negrete, Yesenia Quiroz and Mile Virginia, an iconic event that exemplifies the growing violence in the state of Veracruz. A story that repeats over and over again.
Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco is a visual artist whose films and installations focus on the human body and portraiture. In her work the body is explored as a mirror that reflects different states of being, spanning from the personal to the social and political. She has a strong interest in analog and handmade film as a medium that captures the poetics of light and the moving image. She grew up in Mexico City but has lived in Taiwan, New York, and Boston. She is a graduate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she majored in Film/Video and Studio for Interrelated Media. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including the Museum of the Moving Image and Mono No Aware Festival in New York, Museo Tamayo in Mexico, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento in Argentina, Fronteira Festival in Brazil, Analogica Festival in Italy, and other film festivals and venues. She is a Princess Grace Foundation Honoraria and recipient of the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship. She currently resides and works in Mexico City.
Desaparecer
Elena Pardo and Manuel Trujillo
México, 2017, 4:13
In Mexico one person disappears every 1 hour and 50 minutes: that is, 13 people a day. Through the use of landscape and self-portrait, we explore the ephemeral quality of image and physical presence.
Elena Pardo is an explorer of the moving image dedicated to the production, diffusion and teaching of experimental cinema. She is co-founder of Laboratorio Experimental de Cine (LEC), an artistic project that seeks to strengthen ties between the community of experimental filmmakers through workshops, screenings, residencies, and film production. She participates in audiovisual training projects in Mexico City, Oaxaca, Michoacán, Zacatecas, and other states. Her work has received international recognition and has been exhibited at important festivals, including the Berlinale 2024 in Germany. Her awards and recognitions include first place in the XVII National Experimental Video Competition with the short film Inventario Churubusco as well as the George Stoney Scholarship to attend the 62nd edition of the Flaherty Seminar in New York. She has also been a member of Mexico’s National System of Creators (SNCA) and has completed residencies at Polar Film Lab in Norway, Crater Lab in Barcelona and the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, California.
Manuel “Morris” Trujillo is a cultural manager, film programmer, audiovisual artist, and film performer. He is co-founder of the projects Trinchera Ensamble and Laboratorio Experimental de Cine (LEC), which seek links between cinema and other contemporary arts. His work has been shown in festivals and museums in several countries such as the Museo de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile, the Sammlung Essel in Vienna, Austria, and Mono No Aware in New York. He has also programmed for festivals such as ANIMASIVO in Mexico, the Festival de Cine Radical in Bolivia, Festival Internacional de Cinema Experimental Dobra in Brazil, the S8 Mostra de Cine Periférico in Spain, the VideoEx in Switzerland, and Corriente in Peru, as well as in spaces such as the Centro de Cultura Digital, the ExTeresa Arte Actual and the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. He has obtained support from the BBVA Bancomer Cultural Foundation, IMCINE, CONACULTA, AC/E Acción Cultural Española, among others. Beginning in 2016 he has been founding director of the Fábrica de Artes y Oficios, Faro Aragón, a space for promoting collaborative filmmaking through the training, promotion, and exhibition of community cinema. He is since 2019 a member of the Mexican government’s Community Culture project as well as a technical liaison of the Ibero-American Intergovernmental Cooperation Program, IberCultura Viva. He is also currently an advisor to the Faro Quintana Roo project in Cancun, Mexico.
Canto a un dios robot
Bruno Varela
México, 2025, 4:57
The discovery of a translucent reel recounts the story of the robot god. His death and resurrection, betrayal, revenge, and the return of fire, announcing a new time.
Bruno Varela is an audiovisual artist, researcher, and self-taught film and video creator. His works, mainly located in the geographical and conceptual South, have been featured in museums and festivals such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (Germany), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (U.S.), the Morelia International Film Festival, and FICUNAM (Mexico). Varela has received awards such as the e-flux Prize at the Oberhausen Festival (2015), the Media Artist distinction from the Rockefeller Foundation (2006), the award for best work at the Festival Geografías Suaves (2002), as well as prizes from FICUNAM (2012 and 2023) and the the Biennial of Experimental Video of Mexicali, Baja California (2007, 2012). In 2019 he was a member of Mexico’s National System of Creators (SNCA).
La cuarta plantación
Azucena Losana
México, 2020, 12:37
Between 1968 and 1972. At that time, the National Tourism Office commissioned and distributed these short films that emphasized modernity and comfort in contrast to the exotic and almost pristine nature of our tourist destinations. This new wave of mass tourism became one of the main sources of income for Mexico and the Caribbean. The Cuban historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals called it: The Fourth Plantation, alluding to economic practices of monoculture and neocolonization.
Azucena Losana lives and works in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. In 2021 she was selected as a Professional Development Fellow of the Flaherty Film Seminar and received the Grant for Independent Audiovisual Training from The Mexican Institute of Cinematography (IMCINE). In 2022 she received the e-flux prize at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany, and a special mention by the Black Canvas Festival in Mexico City. In 2023 she received a special mention of the jury of the Umbrales competition in FICUNAM Festival. Her films have been screened at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, BAFICI, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periferico, La Coruña, España, Kurzfilmtage in Oberhausen Germany, Los Angeles Filmforum’s film series Ism, Ism, Ism: Experimental Cinema in Latin America, The Age d'Or Festival in Brussels, VIDEOEX in Zurich, Curta8 in Curitiba Brazil, PAF animation festival in Olomuc, Czech Republic, MEXPARIS MENTAL in France, the International Experimental Film Festival of Moscow MIEFF, the Week of the Experimental Film of La Plata - Argentina, UNCIPAR, among others.
Monte Tláloc
Mariana Dianela Torres
México, 2023, 1:44
I was looking for a stone on Monte Tláloc, then a strange sound hypnotized my camera. With a basis in the expressive register of the landscape, the aim is to guide sound and visual stimuli with nature at the center, in the same place where there was once located the monolith now present in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
Mariana Dianela Torres is a filmmaker and researcher whose work blends social, philosophical, and artistic approach through audiovisual exploration. She holds a degree in Communication with a specialization in Audiovisual Production from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She also studied for an M.A. in Documentary Film at ENAC (UNAM) and has attended various seminars and workshops focused on moving image, art, cinema, and film studies. Since 2015, she has presented her work at numerous film and video festivals, museums, and exhibitions across Mexico, Iran, USA, South America, Africa, and Europe. In 2020 and 2022, her work was notably referred to by the British Film Institute magazine Sight & Sound in its publication “The best video essays.”
Neon cortex
Bruno Varela
México, 2023, 13:56
Various structures and temporalities collapse, becoming embedded in a common memory and ending up weaving a piece laced with light and vapors. Speculative fiction, vegetal narration, a dream of seeds. Neon cortex is a living assembly, a potential film. An entity with a will that resists disintegration and insistently presents itself with new forms. A momoxtle, a pile of basalt stones, beneath an ancient temple, buried and unearthed many times. Runoffs. Digitally warped Super 8 and 16mm.
Bruno Varela is an audiovisual artist, researcher, and self-taught film and video creator. His works, mainly located in the geographical and conceptual South, have been featured in museums and festivals such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (Germany), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (U.S.), the Morelia International Film Festival, and FICUNAM (Mexico). Varela has received awards such as the e-flux Prize at the Oberhausen Festival (2015), the Media Artist distinction from the Rockefeller Foundation (2006), the award for best work at the Festival Geografías Suaves (2002), as well as prizes from FICUNAM (2012 and 2023) and the the Biennial of Experimental Video of Mexicali, Baja California (2007, 2012). In 2019 he was a member of Mexico’s National System of Creators (SNCA).
Yaa Ye’e: Deidades de cuarzo
Biznaga Audiovisual
México, 2024, 20:19
Mixtec-Zapotec antiquity reverberates in an instant; its ancient voices whisper the memory of time and invoke deities that reveal deep secrets engraved in stone. Deidades de Cuarzo (Quartz Deities) is a look at the ungraspable, a liminal window that leads to mineral memories where the apparent univocal directionality of time is interrupted, diluting the forces of nature and the cosmos.
Biznaga Audiovisual is based in Chazumba, Oaxaca. They are a group of filmmakers, directors, musicians, producers, and photographers interested in dismantling the standardized image and exploring hybrid genres: experimental, documentary, ethnofiction, and self-referential. They are greatly interested in recording natural and cultural elements of the Ñuiñe territory in the Mixtec Region of Oaxaca, with special attention to oneiric states and expanded states of consciousness as materialized in cinematic form.
Ajá
Dennis Noel López Sosa
México, 2022, 5:28
Ajá in Oaxaca's Chontal language means water. This essay is an exploration and reinterpretation of the Chontal people’s mystic rain ceremony. We dedicate this audiovisual work to Simitrio, my uncle, a curandero (medicine man), musician and prayer-giver, who recently passed away. He, alongside Martín—prayer-giver and spiritual bearer—guides us in the narration.
Dennis Noel López Sosa is a documentary filmmaker, visual artist, editor, and teacher. His work explores the links between memory, territory, and identity, inspired by his Oaxacan Chontal heritage. A graduate of the program in Audiovisual Communication at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, he has furthered his studies at such institutions as the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in Cuba. His work has been recognized and exhibited at intentional festivals and venues, including DOCS MX, Morelia, Ambulante, the Art Gallery of South Australia, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Canadá, and FIDBA in Argentina. In 2021 he received the PROCINE stimulus to co-direct Lay pijedá, (nuestro pueblo), and in 2022 he co-founded the audiovisual experimentation collective Ajá, which explores the cultural elements of his people via live documentary filmmaking. He is currently working on the feature film Lay taygui (nuestra lengua), exploring his identity via family memory. He also contributes to the development of new creators as a teacher and Coordinator of Audiovisual Production at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana and as a professor at the SAE Institute and the Universidad Rosario Castellanos.
“Comunitarios”
When is a film screening a representation of a community, and when a manifestation of it? When is it apt, upon finding the limits of representation as a concept in film, to reach for a word like the Nahuatl ixiptla? That is, the intimate manifestation of a deity in a tangible being, with etymological connections—as historian Alfred López Austin pointed out—to “skin,” “shell,” and “covering.” The film screen is, after all, a covering that makes manifest something typically far away.
Scant Mexican experimental film has been shown in Boston since Jesse Lerner and Rita González’s traveling Mexperimental Cinema program played at the Harvard Film Archive a quarter-century ago. Across geopolitics and neo-colonial extraction, the recent history might seem elusive and sometimes difficult to trace. It includes dialogues between experimental and Indigenous community video; also, over two decades of a distinctively Mexican tradition of expanded cinema (not easily assimilable to that genre’s currents in the Global North, because neither formalist nor anti-formalist).
The ten films in this program share varying degrees of conviction in film’s capacity to make manifest the sacred (deities, more specifically). Or rather a feeling, upon registering the violence immanent in a landscape, of when the sacred is wonting. In Jael Jacobo’s Macuil (2019), the deities are manifest in the consonances of the clasp of a hand (the “five” of its Nahuatl title) and the embrace of masks, among other physiognomically related symbols present in the Anthropology Museum of Xalapa, Veracruz. In Marcela Cuevas’s Electuario (2023), the sacred emerges in the menstrual blood used to intervene directly in a Super 8 print of The Jungle Book (1967), and where Paracelsus’ botanical instructions for revivifying beings paradoxically, and plaintively, serves as a figure of mourning for the filmmaker’s mother. Hand-processing and intervention in film to mark disappearance also characterizes Annalisa D. Quagliata’s Ñores (Sin Señalar) (2016), an unsentimental outcry for the violence wrought in Veracruz during the governorship of Javier Duarte de Ochoa (2010-2016), just as it characterizes the uncomfortable landscape-reflection dialectic of Elena Pardo and Manuel Trujillo’s Desaparecer (2017).
In the program’s most recent film, Canto a un dios robot (2025), Bruno Varela quite explicitly entertains the idea of the robot as both modern ixiptla and modern Christ, each bearing different senses of rebirth, and thus linking a hand-scanned 35mm trailer for Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987), audio of the “ethical” reflections of the Hong Kong-manufactured robot Sophia, and monoliths from Bolivia’s Tiwanaku archeological site. Computerized audio in that film of a tourist viewing Mexican telenovelas anticipates Azucena Losana’s trenchant but subtly edited satirizing, in La cuarta plantación (2020), of 60s-70s tourism films found by the filmmaker herself in the Mexican embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, thus uncovering the film’s titular, neo-colonial fourth “plantation.” Is viewing these films itself a form of tourism?
An altogether different kind of disappearance and extraction is alluded to in Mariana Dianela Torres’s Monte Tláloc (2023), whose apparitional zooms both ecstatically indulge in and interrogate the site in Coatlinchan, Texcoco, where the statue supposedly of Tlaloc, the rain god—now standing outside Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology—was originally located. Without taking a stand on the common question of whether the statue is in fact the feminine water deity Chalchiuhtlicue, all the film’s movements into the z-axis are colored by the question of the identity of what is missing in that space.
Sometimes what goes missing is the film itself. Another film by Bruno Varela, Neon cortex (2023), conceives of itself as the very momxotle (altar) or “storage of fragmentary data” referred to in its subtitles: it is a reconstruction of Varela’s earlier Corteza neón (2020), which, owing to a hard drive accident, has only existed on Vimeo. This self-reflexiveness extends to its references to experimental subjects who became plants, leaving behind only images. (Are all the images in the film, at bottom, constituted by plants?) Always a roundabout theorist of false consciousness, Varela locates extraction and exploitation as the “parents of lies.” And yet, in the imaginary of this film, it is dreams that have the power to call forth something as tangible as the rain.
If dreams can call forth the elements, why can’t films do that as well? The final two films in the program proffer the question of how literally a film can constitute a rain petition. Perhaps not coincidentally, both emerge from Oaxaca. Biznaga Audiovisual’s Yaa Ye’e: Deidades de cuarzo (2024) is based on a poem by the Mixtec author Lorenzo Hernández, and was filmed in various parts of Oaxaca’s Mixtec region. The “quartz deities” of its title seem not only to inhere in minerals, but also to constitute a hidden element shared by minerals and vegetable life. But sometimes those deities are right in front of us, mediating our vision: here they can serve as the film’s unconventional quartz lenses. Meanwhile Dennis Noel López Sosa, in Ajá (2022), returns to his parents’ town of San Pedro Huamelula, in the Chontal region of Oaxaca, to reconstitute the rain petition, with the politics of its sacred vision buttressed by archival footage derived from the Cuban Santiago Álvarez. Part of a transmedia, including expanded cinema, project, Ajá is grounded in the exigencies of taking responsibility for the ritual with each projection.
Whether it is a question of beseeching Tlaloc, or Chalchiuhtlicue, or Mixtec rituals, or Chontal ones: this cinema’s sense of “experimentation” depends on making present.
-Byron Davies