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.
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