NADIE ES INOCENTE: 20 YEARS LATER
(NADIE ES INOCENTE: 20 ANOS DESPUES)
dir. Sarah Minter, 2010
72 mins. Mexico.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

Saturday, October 2 - 7:30pm
Thursday, October 28 - 10:00pm

In one of her final linear video works before her untimely death in 2016, Sarah Minter revisited the community of punks from Nezahualcoyotl (or "Neza York") vividly captured in NADIE ES INOCENTE, indeed, twenty years later. 20 ANOS DESPUES necessarily becomes a portrait of Mexico's post-NAFTA economic growth, the onset of middle age, and the mellowing of nihilist sensibilities: one punk has become a hardcore Christian, while another exorcises his anger by painting grotesque oil portraits. The result is a sober, yet moving, depiction of life's surprising longeurs (not entirely unlike Michael Apted's UP series) but for the members of the Mierdas Punks like Juan Martinez ("el Kara" in NADIE ES INOCENTE), one of several of Minter's teenage antiheroes who didn't make it.

SARAH MINTER (1953-2016) was a pioneering video and installation artist, a photographer, curator and avant-garde theater performer from Mexico. She spent her early 20s collaborating with Juan Carlos Uviedo, an exiled Argentinean theater director who had migrated to Mexico City after many years heading the Living Theatre at La Mama in the East Village. Minter’s video works are bitter, unforgettable dispatches from the margins of society, drawn in opposition to the tropes and food chains of TV documentary and theatrical distribution; she later experimented with looped installations shot over the course of many years. This is how she described her approach to video as opposed to film:

“I learned to edit and resolve things technically on my own. Creative and financial independence are very important to me, especially if we remember that in the 1980s there was practically no existing support of any kind. I saw people trying to get things done and it took them ten years to make their next movie. That was basically the panorama. They were all failed attempts, and on top of all that, independent film was totally hermetic… If you got money to film, you had to do it with a high percentage of union workers, and if not, you had to pay replacement fees. And once you’d pulled it off it wasn’t easy to show your work. There weren’t festivals in the same quantity as there are today; in Mexico there were hardly any at all, and there were very few in the rest of the world—it wasn’t easy even for famous people. The only kinds of film that kept getting made were Mexican sex comedies and totally commercial movies, which controlled everything.”