Skin Destination

I consider it to be an emergency. Addressing the body in Mexico is to think of the state of exception in which we live. We have now gone beyond the limits of social order. At this moment, the political situation warns us about the domination and dimensions of "biopower" in which we navigate everyday. In Tijuana, as in several regions of the country, the body acquires a new meaning each second. Every day thousands of bodies are subjected to a permanent state of alert and control upon crossing the border ? the same scene in which more than 6,000 undocumented have died since 1994. The city has one of the highest levels of drug addiction and represents geographically the greatest risk of sexually-transmitted diseases in Mexico. Hundreds of people are deported every day to the city, some who remain there, drugged and sick, due to the lack of an efficient program of readaptation in their communities and the multiple abuses that they confront. On the other hand, in Tijuana there are first class laboratories, hospitals, operating rooms and pharmacies where you can find anything at any hour of the day or night. The city has been converted into the medical destination of southern California residents with millions spent on the buying-selling of medicine. But just as in other states, the brutal fight of drug traffickers has left us a large number of bodies that have been mutilated, hung and deposited in unknown graves. Skin Destination comes out of these circumstances and other reflections. In this city, the body is inevitably exchanged as a commodity, merchandise traded for something else. The piece allows me to think about the social, cultural and political order that is revealed so crudely that little is left to surprise us.
 

Skin Destination is part of a project I worked closely on with producer José Inerzia and Miriam García, co-scriptwriter. In addition, it was natural for a group of collaborators ? all visual artists living in Tijuana who are alarmed at the conditions of the country ? to get involved, since we had worked with some of them on other projects. But as always, it's a question of empathies and collective work. The musician, Paúl León ? the only one who doesn't live in the city (he is from Guanajuato) ? joined in the postproduction stage, because this piece received FONCA's Young Creators grant, and it was there where I met him and when he joined the project.

Skin Destination is made up of fragments of family archive material in Super 8 and 15mm. To compile the material, we issued a public call asking for reels and archive material in order to transfer and digitalize them. Two fundamental collaborators ?Talía Góngora and Jesús ? worked at this stage of the project. Without a doubt this was the most complex, but also the most interesting, stage. It was full of discoveries and memories captured in the images of the border ¬? those treasures that you find in the heart of the families of the region, and without which the film could never have been made.

I'd like to continue making non-fiction cinema without a particular format or style ? since this territory of quicksand is fascinating. There are several themes that interest me. At the moment they coincide with this line of work, using the body as a pretext for exploring the surroundings in which I live.

It is an important showcase so that the public can see the film and talk about it in the interesting context of the other works that were selected. It is also a tremendous opportunity to see other productions from the country during the festival. We celebrate the 10th edition, a number that represents the opening and closing of a cycle.