Mexico Silent Film Festival's Journey of Cultural Resistance: Tracing a Path of Community Survival

Abstract

Mexico Silent Film Festival's Journey of Cultural Resistance:Tracing a Path of Community Survival Alejandra Calleja Toxqui (bio), Roxana Hernández Martínez (bio), Ana Gabriela Hernández Rodríguez (bio), Rosa María Licea Garibay (bio), Enrique Moreno Ceballos (bio), Julio Cesar Quiterio Morales (bio), Ana Belén Recoder López (bio), Cecilia Ramírez Morales (bio), Lluvia Soto Rodríguez (bio), and Laetitia Vigneron (bio) Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México/FIC Silente or Mexico Silent Film Festival was born out of a collective necessity to celebrate, study, and promote silent cinema within the city of Puebla and beyond. At the time of our creation, in 2016, a great number of heritage film festivals were already in the picture, from the legendaries such as Bologna's Cinema Ritrovato and Pordenone Silent Film Festival/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, to the closer (but equally legendary) San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Though we share the same raison d'être with these other festivals, there remain significant differences between us: their priorities have focused on North American and European film archives and materials, and our programming emphasizes Latin American filmmaking and exhibition contexts. Located in Puebla, one of the largest cities in Mexico, we strive for a balance in our programming that both speaks to local audiences and exposes them to silent cinema, since an initiative like ours was entirely new in the region. That was our starting point as a team, which mostly includes women and workers in [End Page 263] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. FIC Silente México opens the gates of time and invites audiences to appreciate the complexities and richness of silent films in their own cultural right. Courtesy of Festival Internacional de Cine Silente México. the cultural sector. Our labor is volunteer-driven, independently financed, and requires us to work other jobs to sustain our livelihood. Pueblan Film Culture and the Emergence of FIC Silente At the time of our first edition, Puebla was already a city of thriving film festivals, cinema schools, and cine-clubs. Yet local familiarity with silent cinema was limited to a canonical, patriarchal, and western universe of "great male masters." That is why we insisted on going back to the earliest years: to topple the canon by rediscovering its wild and unruly formations. We all encountered early cinema together as an overflowing river. That abundance further provoked us to confront the absence of cross-cultural dialogue about silent cinema that substantively includes Latin America. Doing so became an impetus for creation and emancipation in the face of established formulas, rigid conventions, and hegemonic screen markets. Simultaneously, and with this nonlinear notion of time and space in mind, we played with the idea of opening the festival to contemporary silent cinema as another aspect of our programming. We decided to expand the corpus of silent films to the twenty-first century, highlighting new works that are marked by the past but made for the present. We curated them through various genre and geographical categories, ranging from French [End Page 264] feminist farce to Bolivian docu-drama. But any technology or aesthetic strategy is fair game, as long as there is no audio dialogue. These films vary quite a bit in terms of budget, production values, and access to resources. To help level the playing field, we do not demand a registration fee from the creators, especially since we receive their materials through open-access digital platforms such as FilmFreeway and Festhome. This is how we programmed our Contemporary Official Selections and also how they became interspersed with the aesthetic practices of films from the early twentieth century. Our aim is to surprise and attract audiences of all ages, persuading and revealing to them that silent cinema is more alive than ever; it is a current multicultural social practice rather than a passing trend or obscure fetish. Along with these screenings and live cinema concerts, we established an educational program that includes courses and workshops, even for children, all designed to encourage people to question their concept of cinema, which has been predominantly shaped by the capitalist culture industry and by Hollywood-sanctioned film canons...