International Festival Signs of the Night - Paris
Festival internatinal Signes de nuit - Paris
 


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20e Festival international Signes de Nuit - Paris / 1-10 octobre 2022

9



FOCUS

MEXICO


October 8th, 2022 - 5 pm
Maison du Mexique - Cité universitaire
9c, Bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris


 

The Farm
La Granja
Sergio Bátiz
Mexico / 2022 / 0:27:30

‘La Granja’ investigates three disabled people from Oaxaca City (Mexico's Southeast State) equally ignored by their country social development actions. The government long-term psychiatric hospitals known as ‘Farms’ (Granjas) under which one-third to one-half of the population was misclassified, abused, and then released to society, is a metaphor for this film. At first, the film could be mistaken as a work of romantic street beggars. However, the portrait of an unprotected class with several disabilities during the last year of the twenty-century fast becomes the subject issue of the film. A political climate of false promises, inefficient social plans, and a recent right wing government monopoly that never provided any real care for the people being portrayed, is the upsetting background. Costly political campaigns and the largest fraud in the country’s election history, with a political active marginalize people being brainwashed (Time is proof of this last statement) get a revisit. A look back in time on glorious Ektachrome color reversal film stock, with some unusual yet talented citizens becomes a refreshing exercise of modern anthropology. How Mexico became a violent and modernized country at the same time? ‘La Granja’ is perhaps the country gap, the Mexico with real wounded disable heroes rarely understand on a trip to Baja, Puerto Vallarta, or Yucatan. The non-fictitious Mexico, with the systems’ left behinds for future reference have here some answers and clear clues.


EUROPEAN PREMIERE


 

Adopt a Dog
Adopte un perro
Juan Manuel Barreda
Mexico / 2022 / 0:23:00

A gloomy office worker adopts a stray dog believing that this will strengthen his position in his girlfriend's family, but the little animal only starts to provoke his downfall. The young man will try to preserve his place by all means.













 

The Simple Things
Las cosas simples
Claudia Lavista, Alexander Dahm
Mexico / 2022 / 0:54:00

Simple things are not so simple. Once again, Delfos presents us with the different possibilities of waking up, as in a dream, from a world that was trapped, between walls, but also in situations. Burdens of absences and presences, knots that suffocate us, that bind us but also free us. The repetition of the unusual monotony. We need to cling to the fragments that dreams gave us between the confusion of nights and days and only in this way can we rebuild ourselves, little by little. We try to disappear so we can go out again. We cohabit next to each other in the abandonment of looks. And when, finally, we could touch, then, we turned to look at each other, lightening the load as the knots gave way in amazement, one by one, as simple as all the simple things in life. It is a 50-minute video-dance project created by Claudia Lavista in collaboration with the filmmaker Alexander Dahm (Chile/Mexico), composers Albert Mathias (San Francisco), Luis Miguel Costero and Cristobal Sarmiento (Mexico), with the dancers of Delfos danza contemporánea company. It is divided into 5 shorts that can be presented as one long suite all together, or each one individually depending on the context and needs of the Festival. “The simple things” is a visual, body and sound research that seeks from intimacy, to find inner silence, that space invisible to the gaze, but so tangible to intuition. We work around concepts related to the image and the scenic strength of the static as a way of encapsulating time (memory), as well as from processes of meaning of various symbols built from the gesture, the objects and the contained emotion to, with all this, interweave a scenic/visual poetic language.