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Maestro Prodigioso: A Feature Film with Three Shorts

Laura Salas tranlated by Morris Thompson

Using stills and video clips narrated in poetic tones, the film relates three stories of teachers' struggles against adversity in the education system:

Memoriales de un loco bears witness to the marginalized education in rural communities. La misión is about the expulsion and death of missionary Jesuit teachers from Mexico in the 19th century, while the title work El maestro prodigioso recounts the dark episode of events during the 1968 student movement in Mexico.

 The screening was preceded by a brief introduction. Afterwards, Corkidi said that the film was born from what he felt he had to do and that he really wasn't thinking about satisfying the public or film critics. "I don't defend the film," he said. "It's a small effort, and now when I watch it again, I just find new faults. What I like is that I finished it."

Corkidi said that he found the process profoundly engrossing and terribly painful. It left him, he said, with the lesson that "one can do something when the imperative rules. I was always struggling with my judgment, and that made it so terrible hard to finish. Besides, I never feel that any project is done. It's only the basis for the ones that follow." 

In closing the question-and-answer period, festival programming coordinator Joaquín Rodríguez stressed that Mexican cinema is deeply indebted to Cordiki even though his work is under-appreciated and especially the films he made in the 1970s and 1980s.