Event Venue: Cineteca Nacional México
Event time (screening): 29 October 2011 from 2-9pm
Event time (inspection): accepted films until noon on the 29th
Total Audience: Over the course of the day, perhaps 85 people? Unfortunately, we didn’t have the manpower to take an accurate count.
Number of people bringing films: 3 people brought films that day for the event. In total, we screened films from 20 people.
Films screened by Gauge: (all numbers are approximate)
8mm: 15
Super 8: 31
16mm: 6
9.5mm: 0
Video: 0
Volunteers: Audrey Young, Kyzza Terrazas, Issa García Ascot
Press (pre-event and post-event): Radio interview
Report submitted by: Audrey Young
This was only the second Home Movie Day in Mexico City, and the first event since 2003. There is not a strong sense of home movies as being meaningful yet in Mexico, and we saw that in the promotion for the event. Despite sending out a press release and advertising the event with a PSA on the public bus system, only two people showed up to bring films to show. The rest of the event we programmed with films the Cineteca has been collecting through the Archivo Memoria program. As the event approached and we realized that the response was not as anticipated, we began to call everyone who had brought in their films to ask them if they wanted to come watch them during Home Movie Day. We ended up getting a fairly strong response and projected films nonstop from 2pm until after 9pm.
There were a few interesting films that we discovered at the event: a trip to Yucatán on 8mm from 1956, a set of stop-motion animations from the 60s and 70s by a man whose granddaughter described him as a “mad inventor”, a short film documenting the marches for sexual freedom in the 1970s and scenes in the life of a traditional Jewish family in 1960s Mexico.
But perhaps more important than the films themselves was the reaction to the event. Those families that we invited to attend were thrilled. One family showed up with fifteen or twenty people, including the matriarch who had filmed everything. Others came merely out of curiosity to see their films for the first time in twenty years and ended up staying all afternoon, captivated by the families of strangers.