Tropic of Cancer

Minimalist in resources and filmed from the unusual vantage point of a second-floor flat window, Malintzin 17 portrays two parallel expressions of parental care. For seven days and seven nights, filmmaker Eugenio Polgovsky and his five-year-old daughter Milena watch a pigeon tending her chick in a dangerous tangle of electrical wires just outside their balcony.

A work of video art inspired by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell; the piece is part of a special initiative to celebrate the opening of the Maxwell Centre. Using Maxwell’s original equipment, including his zoetrope (an animation device), Polgovsky explores the nature of light and perceptions of color in Lightbyrinth.

At the latitude of the Tropic of Cancer in the desert of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, many families survive by hunting animals and selling them along the highway.