SESSION 115, ILLEGAL_CINEMA

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

Fauna is a metafictional story set in a remote village in the north of Mexico, where a family gathering is disrupted by a parallel reality created by two siblings. Luisa and Gabino pass the time inventing characters based on the stereotypes found in narco-literature and popular series like Narcos, elements that make up a large part of the Mexican imaginary today. Part absurd comedy and part poetical reflection, Fauna explores the seepage of the world of drug traffickers into popular culture and everyday thinking. The most dangerous figures of the region become both omnipresent and abstract, and, meanwhile, there is an underlying threat of real violence.

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

Marina Massidda (Cambridge, Massachusetts 1995) is a painter whose training covers several fields. Recently, she completed the Master’s degree in painting at the UPV/EHU, which culminated in her first one person show at the Torre de Ariz, titled El exceso vital (The Vital Excess). Previously she lived in Los Angeles, where she studied film on an Annenberg scholarship at the University of Southern California. At present she is developing her artistic production in Bilbao, with a body of work dedicated to representing her immediate surroundings, employing a realist approach.