SESSION 115, ILLEGAL_CINEMA

Screening of Fauna by Nicolás Pereda (Mexico-Canada, 2020) proposed by Marina Massidda, followed by a discussion.

Fauna is a metafictional story set in a remote village in northern Mexico, where a family reunion is punctuated by the parallel reality created by two siblings. Luisa and Gabino pass the time inventing characters based on clichés from narco-literature and popular series like Narcos, elements that make up a large part of the contemporary Mexican imaginary. Blending absurdist comedy with poetic reflection, Fauna explores how the world of cartels seeps into popular culture and everyday thought. The most dangerous figures of the region become both omnipresent and abstract, while a real, underlying threat of violence lingers.

Together, we will analyse this amusing but opaque gem, questioning our own distance from – or proximity to – the forms of violence that are embedded in our intertextual imaginary.

Marina Massidda (Cambridge, Massachusetts 1995) is a painter with a multidisciplinary background. Recently, she completed a Master’s degree in painting at UPV/EHU, which culminated in her first solo show at Torre de Ariz, titled El exceso vital. Previously she lived in Los Angeles, where she pursued Cinema & Media Studies as an Annenberg scholar at the University of Southern California. At present she is developing her studio practice in Bilbao, creating a body of work dedicated to representing her immediate surroundings through a realist approach.