Afterimage, Afterlife: Mexican Experimental Cinema and the Form of Absence

Afterimage, Afterlife: Mexican Experimental Cinema and the Form of Absence

Programmed by Lola Lemke

Presented by Barking Community Cinema

While Mexico is haunted by a long history of censorship and the repression of dissident voices, recent decades have witnessed an increase in state-sanctioned violence. Amidst a convoluted present—marked by missing people, concealed stories, and destroyed records—experimental cinema practices that address and denounce the country's socio-political reality inevitably grapple with the difficulty of conveying unfathomable events. How can absence and grief be expressed through cinematic forms?

Moving between fragments and spectres, the works in this programme explore our camera-mediated understanding of turbulent times, turning to images as sites of both testimony and artifice. Reassembled archives, scratched surfaces, and unsettling collisions summon lingering ghosts, whose traces resist systemic erasure and undermine official narratives. Gestures commemorating loss become acts of protest, inviting a tactile encounter with histories whose meanings have been obscured by conflict. In refusing clarity and closure these works remind us that the image, as history, “is not a closed field of knowledge, it is a whirling, centrifugal field,” open to myriad afterlives. (quote by Georges Didi-Huberman)

Image Credit: Mauricio Sánchez Arias Las imágenes cristal de nuestra ciudad / The Crystal Images of Our City (2023).

Programme:

Las imágenes cristal de nuestra ciudad / The Crystal Images of Our City Mauricio Sánchez Arias (2023), 11 min.

Se busca (un mar de ausencia) / Missing (A Sea of Absence) Annalisa D. Quagliata (2016), 2 min.

De la naturaleza del hueso / On the Nature of the Bone Elena Pardo (2018), 2 min.

¡Allá vienen! / There They Come! Ezequiel Reyes (2017), 8 min.

Los cuerpos indóciles / Indocile Bodies Bruno Varela (2018), 4 min.

Colisión / Collision Bruno Varela (2014), 4 min.

Biombo de Acapulco / Acapulco Folding Screen Unidad de Montaje Dialéctico (2024), 29 min.

Paralaje / Parallax Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (2018), 5 min.

Total running time: 65 min ⚠️ Content warning: Mentions of violence, enforced disappearance, death, and dying.

Lola Lemke (she/her) is a writer and researcher from Mexico based in London. Her work centres on experimental cinema and artists’ moving image, with a focus on Latin American and feminist practices. She holds a Film Studies MA from King’s College London.

Barking Community Cinema is co-programmed by Abel Holsborough and Maria Anastassiou and hosts free monthly screenings of independent, artist film and experimental work. Throughout 2025 they have hosted free filmmaking workshops and launched a network of community programmers, for people who live in or have a connection to Barking and Dagenham.

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Light snacks and drinks will be provided. All children under 16 years old must be accompanied by an adult.

If you have any access needs or would like to get in touch about our programming please email: barkingcommunitycinema@gmail.com

This free screening is in support of communities in the Carribean affected by Hurricane Melissa. Please consider making a donation to these fundraisers:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-jamaicas-communities-after-hurricane-melissa

https://www.gofundme.com/f/raising-funds-for-jamaica