With the goal of positioning Querétaro as a showcase for Mexican experimental cinema, Nuria González Pimentel, Ariana Ibáñez Barrera, and Caro Águila Mejía have joined forces to promote an Experimental Film Festival, which will screen the works of filmmakers from different parts of the country.
Their platform, called “Destruir dice ellx,” is a traveling project of experimental audiovisual creation and exhibition, seeking to highlight and strengthen local and national film production.
The festival’s programming will span various cultural venues, including the City Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and several faculties of the Autonomous University of Querétaro (UAQ), as well as other independent spaces in the city.
Nuria González Pimentel, co-founder and programmer of the festival, describes it in an interview with Diario de Querétaro as “a panorama of contemporary experimental cinema in Mexico, in dialogue with local filmmakers, with retrospectives and pieces that transform the way we relate to films and reality.”
Thematically, the exhibition ranges from bodily exploration and posthumanism to horror films, decoloniality, Latin American speculative fiction, LGBT+ themes, and films of social and political resistance. González Pimentel points out that the festival seeks to be “a space for encounter and feedback between filmmakers and audiences, promoting collective projection in the face of the fragmentation of cultural experiences.”
Its graphic identity refers to the eruption of a volcano, with which the organizers intend to nod to the “scene that seems dormant” in Querétaro, but which, by encouraging these types of encounters, “explodes” without warning.
In its second edition, the project benefited from the Mexican Film Promotion (Focine) program of the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE) and has an investment of approximately 295,000 pesos, of which 220,000 came from Focine.
From October 2 to 30, there will be 22 free screenings, featuring more than 30 artists and screening a total of 44 films. Destruir dice ellx not only aims to showcase films, but also to build community, make new narratives visible, and open a space that transforms the way experimental cinema is produced and appreciated in Mexico.
On social media, you can follow their work on Instagram @destruir_diceellx.
What are the must-sees?
Among the highlights of this second edition is the opening screening, which will take place on Thursday, October 2nd at 8:00 PM at the Museo de la Ciudad. It will be a screening of ¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! ¡Ya México no existerá más! (2024) by Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco, winner of the Jury Prize in the feature film category of the Chimal competition at the Doqumenta International Film and Non-Fiction Narrative Festival. The director will be present to talk with the audience about her work.
Other highlights include the short film program “De memoria están hecha las piedras” (Stones are Made of Memory), which will take place on Saturday, October 4th at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro at 7:00 PM and on October 17th at La Pessoa, also at 7:00 PM. Internationally renowned filmmakers such as Mariana Dianela Torres, Bruno Varela, Íntima Volcánica, Juanita Onzaga, Susana Ginebra, and the Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico (Dialectic Editing Unit) participate in the series.
They also collaborate with the Museum of Transfeminine Art in Mexico City. The event, titled Your Body is a Copy of Venus, consists of a screening of music videos made by and for the trans community. The event takes place on Saturday, October 11th at 9:00 PM at Cuauhtémoc #43—CUAU, a creative, cultural, and multidisciplinary space—and features artists Adly Muff, Cadensa, Luisa Almaguer, Mariposas Negras, Sofía Moreno, and V.A.L.I.S. Zemmoa.
Among the feature films, stands out Un techo sin cielo (A Roof Without a Sky) by Diego Hernández, a Tijuana-born filmmaker who will be presenting his work in Querétaro for the first time. Her film will be screened on October 15th at 12:00 pm at the UAQ Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, along with Deborah Almodóvar’s film Percepciones de un pez (Perceptions of a Fish). Both feature films will have a second screening on October 18th at 8:00 pm at La Pessoa.
The festival’s closing ceremony will be on Thursday, October 30th at the Museo de la Ciudad at 8:00 pm. The event will feature the Los Ingrávidos collective from Tehuacán, Puebla, which formed in 2012 out of the need to “dismantle the audiovisual grammar that aesthetic-television-cinematographic corporatism has used to guarantee the dissemination of an audiovisual ideology.” The collective will present five pieces representative of its prolific career.
The festival also aims to highlight local productions. Works by Querétaro artists such as Susana Ginebra, Íntima Volcánica, Haniel Fonseca, Andrea Alvarado Sánchez, Marta Hernández, Lluvia Anaïs, and others will be screened.
Source: oem
