10 · 09 · 08

First Lady Margarita Zavala attends Los Herederos

Doris Morales y Clara Sánchez/Translated by Caroline MacKinnon

imagen]Yesterday the Cinépolis Centro was heavily guarded starting early in the day. The surroundings of the movie theater were being watched, and two metal detectors were placed in the entrance. There were also personnel examining people’s possessions on their way into the building. The reason? First lady Margarita Zavala, wife of President Felipe Calderón, would be attending three events, Program 11 of the Mexican Documentary section; short films from the Indigenous Peoples Forum and the Eugenio Polgovsky film Los Herederos.

Zavala arrived accompanied by Magdalena Ojeda, the wife of Michoacán governor Leonel Godoy; Alejandro Ramírez and Daniela Michel, respectively the president and director of the Morelia International Film Festival.

[imagen]Program 11 of the short film section, which included Christoph Muller’s Ciudad huacal and Erick Zavala Flores’ Stanley Sprockets: 101 Ways to Make a World Tour, was screened in theater 1 where Ramírez welcomed them.

Later they arrived at theater 2, where short films from Chaipas were being shown as part of the Indigenous Peoples Forum. The films being shown were La fiesta del maíz. El tercer encuentro del Maíz Zoque by Roberto Alejandro Corzo and José Angel López; Día de muertos en la tierra de los murciélagos by Pedro Daniel López; Mil años después… by Pablo Chankín; Saberes de las partes indígenas de Chiapas by Pedro Agripino Ico Bautista and Cómo aprendí a trabajar by Marcela Moreno Burgos.

The last event attended by Margarita Zavala and Magdalena Ojeda, who is the director of the state’s family development agency, was the screening of Los Herederos at 9 p.m. Besides the film’s director, Eugenio Polgovsky; Marina Stavenhagen, the director of IMCINE; Jean Christophe Berjon, the director of International Critics’ Week and actress Patricia Bernal were also in attendance.

[imagen]Los Herederos is a portrait of the sad reality lived by many children in various communities in Mexico. These children work in deplorable conditions in brick factories, in the countryside (chopping wood, picking tomatoes and corn), making wooden figures or alebrijes (painted papier mache and wooden crafts), as well as weaving cloth, or preparing food at home. Age doesn’t matter; they learn the responsibilities of work from the time that they are very young, this is the only thing that is passed down to them from their parents.

Seeing these images of poverty, exhaustion and innocence that is reflected in the children’s faces, the way they are harmed by conditions that they live in and how it reveals a terrible situation of neglect and oversight, the audience was clearly moved and gave Polgovsky a great round of applause.

The filmmaker said that it took three years to make this documentary that was filmed in different communities in the states of de Veracruz, Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero, “where the images speak for themselves.”