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Six Documentaries and a Film about Mexico City
Mexico City, 2001-2003
Six Documentaries and a Film about Mexico City is an effort
to draw closer to and share the lives of six individuals and their friends,
their relatives, their challenges, disappointments and desires. The aim
is to focus on the “ordinary” individual within the tempestuous
setting of Mexico City.
The stories that don’t make it to the big screen, or even the little
screen; the stories that we live side-by-side with; that we, ourselves,
live. Happenings that our attention finds easier to disregard, in an apparent
wish to disassociate ourselves from our immediate reality. Chronicles
and chroniclers within the video-documentaries invite us to dwell for
a moment within the quotidian, to engage in our most proximate surroundings.
Six Documentaries and a Film about Mexico City proposes a rethinking of
the everyday, the commonplace, as not an (un)avoidable circumstance, but
rather as a dynamic axis.
The seven videos (six documentaries and one film) were produced during
the course of fifteen months, by a group comprised of nine visual artists,
writers and filmmakers from Mexico and abroad. Every two months, a team
of two to three people came together in this city, with the purpose of
producing one of the documentaries. For a period of three weeks, the group
stuck around and filmed one inhabitant of Mexico City, as well as his/her
circle of friends, relatives and colleagues. Consequently, a second period
of three weeks was devoted to the task of edition and post-production.
A series of copies of the documentaries were distributed hand-to-hand,
among those who appeared in the documentaries. These individuals, in turn,
distributed the tapes among their own circle of friends, acquaintances
and neighbors. In 2003, the project will be presented to the public at
large in different venues throughout the city, via a series of projections
and talks within different spaces and forums such as schools, public libraries,
public squares, cultural centers and neighborhood communities.
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