Resurrección (2016) User Reviews

Resurrection: the tireless struggle of longing

[sebastianha96 · 6/10 · 10 December 2018]

The other great power of cinema, that which is not measured in special effects, renowned actors, or numbers of tickets sold, is what allows to capture reality without adornments or tapujos, whose manifestation par excellence is the documentary genre; this vast spectrum of audiovisual art is where our country has stood out in recent years, partly due to a budget issue that practically forced many filmmakers to abandon fiction; but it is also because Mexico is a hotbed of stories, although some of us do not like them; Clear example of this leaves '' Resurrection '', a tape that shows a story of indignation, despair, and impunity. Resurrección, the documentary's fourth documentary by the Mexican Eugenio Polgovsky, portrays the lives of the inhabitants bordering the waterfall of El Salto de Juanacatlán, and the harmful effects that the local industrial corridor, located on the banks of the river that feeds it, has produced in the ecosystem, health, and lifestyle of this population. Polgovsky, responsible for the cinephotography of the film, presents devastating images, which with equal crudeness discover the Santiago River, undoubted protagonist, covered by a white pollution foam that ominously rises in the air, as well as a small, victim of an aggressive dermatitis, consequence of the years that lived exposed to the toxic waste that emanate from the body of water. The rest of the town becomes a quasi-apocalyptic landscape, where houses, buildings, and fields have been stripped of their rural quaint, as the archive materials here used (ironically produced by a naive government instance) presume, and which now It has become difficult to imagine. Unfortunately, the supposed clandestinity of the filming resulted in the use of cameras and sound recording devices with quality inferior to what is usually seen on cinema screens. In spite of this, the cinematographic work is rescued by the testimonies of the native settlers, who narrate with nostalgic bitterness a forgotten Juanacatlán and El Salto, snatched from their memory, as well as the constant activism carried out by their descendants, who between impotence and the longing they look for to return to that past that only they know by anecdotes and minuscule slides of his childhood. Film of environmental complaint, necessarily transformed into a social complaint; stories of local problems, which concern everyone. Documentary that gives voice to those who insist on silence.