Overview

Gabriela Golder introduces Cinépolis, La Capital del Cine [Cinepolis, the Film Capital](2003) by Ximena Cuevas:

’I've admired Ximena Cuevas ever since I got a bootleg copy of her work. I don't remember who gave it to me, but I do remember when I met Ximena for the first time at the Videobrasil festival, I think in 2005. Ximena is a magician. She manipulates the audiovisual material, she swallows it, she appropriates it without reverence, she gets angry and has fun, she transforms it into something else. The cinema of Ximena Cuevas is something else. It was hard for me to choose just one of her works. I chose Cinépolis, a work in which, through a huge amount of found footage and through a multitude of different technical intrusions, she proposes a biting reflection on the consumption of images and the cultural invasion of the United States of Americaa in Mexico.’

About the work:

In a biting, satirical visual narrative constructed from a stream of found footage, Cuevas relates the appropriation of everyday Mexican life by the culture of the United States. She predicts that this invasion will take the form of a fully branded consumer landscape.

This film has been screened internationally at various galleries, museums and festivals, including Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2019); Lodos, Mexico City (2018); Los Angeles Filmforum (2017); Videoex Film Festival, Zurich (2017); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014), Sala de Arte Publico Siquerios, Mexico City (2003).

Screening and Booking Information

Cinépolis, La Capital del Cine [Cinepolis, the Film Capital] (2003)
Ximena Cuevas
Mexico
Experimental | 22 minutes
No dialogue with Spanish with Arabic and English subtitles

This screening is part of the Genealogies in the Middle East and Latin America project, which explores historical and contemporary relationships between artists from these two regions. It unfolds along narratives revealed by the artists' personal accounts that provide critical alternative perspectives and insights by decentralising dominant narratives, schools and paradigms produced and affirmed in the West.