What resonated with me? Maybe it was the innumerable accounts of children, infants, babies either dead or dying at the hands of hazardous chemicals in their water, in the air they breathe, in the dust that settles on every square inch of Tijuana. Maybe it was the myriad hate crimes against mother Earth inflicted by American corporations so tyrannous in their stupidity that it's heinous, or the very deliberate American way of making a socioeconomical wasteland of the rest of the world and somehow still evading, punishing or shamelessly ignoring every recrimination, every allegation of human rights violation and every law that should have had them axed on the spot a long time ago. Maybe it was the despairing reality of our multinational economical hierarchies or the guilty reality that every day I participate somehow in the globalization of commodity fetishism, every day I put my money where my mouth is when I fund the corporate hegemonies that value and handle humans as commodities, every day I accept the conditions of living as a woman in this world and every day I feel more comfortable as a sister than a friend.
Maquilapolis took the notion of film as an "Empathy Machine" to a whole new level. The tactics and the strategies by which Funari and de la Torre made the experiences of the women working (hell, even trying to work) in these factories both aberrant and familiar were many and innovative, and they started with one of the most provocative means of storytelling: gesture--old as time (that's in our nature) and unadulterated by language (that's universal).
...more to come...
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