MEXICO by Steve Sanguedolce and Mike Hoolboom 1992 Canada 35 min ENG

In Mexico, first prize winner at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 1993, we are taken to Mexico City and back to Toronto in a timeless, beautifully filmed and paced journey through the ’New World Order’ with images of bullfights, dinosaur graveyards, aquariums, tourists climbing the Aztec Pyramids and the belching smoke of a North American factory polluting the Mexican jungle. “The best experimental film from around the world not only displayed some new way of looking through cinema but something new at which to look at. Although its initial context is a languidly dystopic trip from Toronto to Monterey and back again, (Mexico’s) true subject is power: the power inscribed in the unseeing gaze of the tourist, the power manifest in the recently signed North American Free Trade Agreement, under the auspices of which Mexican workers threaten to be divied up by American and Canadian corporations tired of living wages, labour unions and environmental regulations.“ - Oberhausen Film Festi