Malintzin 17
Eugenio Polgovsky
•
1h 3m
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky and Mara Polgovsky • Documentary • 2022 • 64 minutes
Filmed from the unusual vantage-point of a second-floor apartment window, MALINTZIN 17 portrays two parallel expressions of parental care.
For seven days and nights filmmaker Eugenio Polgovsky and his five-year-old daughter, Milena, contemplate a nurturing dove nesting her chick on a hazardous entanglement of electric cables situated outside their balcony. The dove endures the cold and torrential rain, while Milena makes puzzled inquiries to her father about the bird’s location, its stillness, the meaning – and perils – of filming it, its true nature and potential ways to assist it. Wielding a handheld camera from this elevated point of view, which parallels the bird’s, the film constructs a microscopic yet powerful environmental critique of nature’s entrapment within the aggressive infrastructures of modernity.
Polgovsky’s sister, Mara, found this material after Eugenio died suddenly, aged 40, and carefully edited it into a film that is both his and hers. MALINTZIN 17 is a minimalist, visually alluring ecological plea that ponders how nature is forced to adapt to an ever expanding human world.
Up Next in Eugenio Polgovsky
-
The Inheritors
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2009 • 90 minutes
The most highly praised and awarded Mexican documentary in many years, THE INHERITORS by Eugenio Polgovsky immerses us in the daily lives of children who, with their families, survive only by their unrelenting labor.
The film takes...
-
Resurrección / Resurrection
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2016 • 93 minutes
The once-paradisiacal waterfall of "El Salto de Juanacatlán" in Jalisco used to be known as the "Mexican Niagara”, a source of pleasure and sustenance for the villages surrounding it. This natural idyll was heavily polluted when an ...
-
Trópico de Cancer / Tropic of Cancer
Directed by Eugenio Polgovsky • Documentary • 2004 • 52 minutes
Polgovsky’s stunning debut immerses the viewer in the impoverished lives of families in the arid desert region of San Luis Potosi in Mexico (situated on the global parallel known as Tropic of Cancer), who survive by selling plants a...