Special MexDocs Panel Discussion:
Friday, December 11, 5pm EST
Facebook Live
Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Cultures at New York University. Special thanks to professor Jens Andermann.
Join us on Friday, December 11 on Cinema Tropical’s Facebook Live for a special panel discussion with MexDocs featured filmmakers Daniel Alatorre (Retreat), Sergio Morkin (Maricarmen), Michelle Ibaven (When I Shut My Eyes) and Adriana Otero (What Happened to the Bees?) who will be discussing their individual work, their relationship to their stories and their subjects, as well as the current challenges facing non-fiction directors in Mexico.
The conversation will be moderated by Laura Torres Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Cultures at New York University.
MexDocs: Recent Mexican Documentaries, taking place December 10-16, 2020, presents four outstanding program offering a nuanced perspective on contemporary Mexico by delving into the different social, political, and cultural issues currently at play in the country, with a particular emphasis on narratives of womanhood and indigenous resistance. For more information visit: https://www.cinematropical.com/mexdocs
MexDocs is presented by Cinema Tropical and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. Additional support provided by the CUNY Mexican Studies Institute at Lehman College, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature at New York University.
Bios:
Daniela Alatorre is a producer, programmer and documentary maker. She is the producer of the Oscar shorlisted docuentary film Midnight Family (2018) by Luke Lorentzen;l the Sundance Award winning documentary El General (2009), directed by Natalia Almada; ¡De Panzazo! (2012), the second most seen documentary in the history of Mexico, directed by Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Loret de Mola; El Ingeniero (2012), which won Best Documentary at the Mexican Film Festival of the Americas, directed by Alejandro Lubezki; and the NYT OpDocs Unsilenced, directed by Betzabé García. She is the co-founder of No Ficcion, a production company based in Mexico City, and was the head of the Documentary Programming Committee for the Morelia International Film Festival, which she produced for ten years. She is part of the board of trustees of the Ambulante Film Festival in Mexico and served in the board of directors of the Flaherty Film Seminar in New York. Daniela has been part of the Sundance Editing, Music and Creative Producing Labs, a Flaherty Film Seminar fellow in 2010, and a participant from 2011 to 2016. She holds an MFA in documentary film from the School of Visual Arts in NY. Retreat is her debut feature.
Michelle Ibaven was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1981. She Graduated in Communication Sciences, specializing in Audiovisual Production. Studied Documentary Film Direction and Writing and Digital Film Photography Direction from the Madrid Film Institute. In 2012, she finished her First documentary film No Hay Place Is Far Away, receiving, among other awards, the Best Documentary Made by a Woman at the Morelia International Film Festival. His second feature When I Close My Eyes won the Best Documentary Award from Cinelatino, Rencontres de Toulouse and the José Rovirosa Award for Best Documentary Film in 2019. Some of her collaborations as producer had been published in The New York Times’ Op-Docs series and Aljazeera’ Viewfinder.
Sergio Morkin is an Argentinean documentary filmmaker living in Mexico. He studied cinematography in Buenos Aires and graduated in 1995, and was drawn into film and drama direction. His critically acclaimed documentary film Oscar (2004) has received numerous international awards. Since then, Morkin has worked for several production companies and directed different documentary films for TV. He also designs and teaches documentary filmmaking workshops throughout Mexico and is project adviser for documentaries. In 2012 he filmed and directed The Ginger Ninjas Ride Mexico, a feature documentary film that audiences have responded enthusiastically to at film festivals. Morkin is a founding partner of Lupe & Hijos Films and produced The Charro of Toluquilla, a documentary film by director José Villalobos Romero and coproduced by IMCINE. His most recent documentary Maricarmen (2019) coproduced by IMCINE has received many awards in several festivals including Best Documentary Feature at the San Diego Latino Film Festival, Public’s Choice Award at the Morelia International Film Festival, among others. Cinépolis will theatrical release the film in Mexico in early 2021. His projects have obtained support from several institutions like Fondo Nacional de las Artes, (Argentina), Altercine (Canada), Aeci (Spain), Docsforum (Mexico), ITDP (Mexico), IMCINE (Mexico), Tribeca Film Institute (USA) Gabriel Figueroa Fund (Mexico) Fundación Cinépolis (Mexico), EFICINE (Mexico), among others.
Adriana Otero is a filmmaker from Mérida, Yucatán. She graduated from the School of Arts of Yucatán with a master’s degree in the Production and Teaching of Visual Arts. She has produced and co-directed several documentaries such as The Value of the Earth (El Valor de la Tierra), for which she won Best Mexican Documentary Short Film at the Kayché Tejidos Visuales Film and Video Festival in 2015. She was awarded the PECDA Yucatan in 2014, won the 2015 Municipal Youth Prize in the category “Cultura” and was beneficiary of the Municipal Fund for Visual Arts and FONCA in 2016. In 2018 she won the IMCINE National Short Film Competition. In 2019 she produced and co-directed her debut film What Happened to the Bees? As a Yucatán-born filmmaker, she wants to raise awareness of socio-environmental conflicts that are taking place in the indigenous Mexican territories.
Laura Torres-Rodríguez is an Associate Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. Laura’s areas of research and teaching include Mexican literature and film; transpacific ecologies and poetics; feminist aesthetics; and Puerto Rican performance and arts during the debt crisis. She is the author of Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia [Transpacific Orientations: Mexican Modernity and the Specter of Asia] (2019).
