2023 / Experimental – 16mm , 11 min. Mexico – France
The death, around 1916, of some seventy Chinese and Asian exiles on a vast rugged terrain lying between San Felipe Bay and the town of Mexicali, was likely the result of their attempt to flee the racist campaigns aimed at eliminating them from Mexican territory. Yet almost nothing remains of this event, no official register, no commemorative plaque, no archaeological dig. Nothing except the name given since then to the mountain overlooking this desert: El Chinero. With no documents and no scientific work to disclose the history of racism covered by a national identity nonetheless built in the image of the mestizo, Iranian artist and filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi invents the beginnings of an archive, a fragile and inchoate prolongation of the spirit of the place, based on the little that is known: legends, oral history, ghostly presences, ambiguous traces. Capturing the aura of the place, the filmstrip, developed using organic and inorganic elements collected on the site, also steeps us in its light and matter. One of the intertitles in this black and white silent film – with Andy Moor’s electric guitar on the soundtrack evoking some ghostly western – asks if the earth and rocks can bear witness. Can the mountain speak for the dead? Can an analogue thought carry the voice of the ghosts to us? And by extension, can this film bear witness for other tragedies and stir up the earth of mass graves worldwide that will only be opened after the demise of nationalist myths and totalitarian regimes?
– Antoine Thirion, film programmer and writer
The filmmaker is alone with her 16mm camera and the infinite richness of expression through experimental cinema, questioning places of memory left without historical testimony. When the human sciences can’t bear witness to the past, free artistic expression is an encouraging way of questioning events that have left no official trace. In this way, the perception of an idyllic setting in the Mexican desert suggests, through the very absence of human beings, the pain of mourning that could not really take place. Bani Khoshnoudi has worked with the very texture of her film as a material, so that contemporary filming can commune with a time past, with scratches and overexposures constantly harking back to a bygone era. From then on, the filmic experience becomes a spiritist séance where the dead are summoned to share meaning through the power of poetic associations in a sensory experience of the film enveloped by Andy Moor’s musical composition.
Cédric Lépine, film critic, Mediapart
“The word aftermath is an agricultural term, and refers to the moment after mowing, when the grass has been cut.” In the opening scenes of El Chinero, a phantom hill, a camera pans across a desert landscape near Mexicali, before directing our gaze to particular objects: rocks, plants, the withered roots of a dead tree. Later, we learn that seventy men and women died here, mostly Chinese migrants who, in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, were attempting to cross the desert. They left no visible traces in the land, and no monuments have been erected in their memory. Nevertheless, the film searches for – and discovers – a kind of presence. It does this without grand gestures or sentimentality, but by altering our sense of what is there. Not that the landscape changes under the film’s scrutiny: the rock remains a rock, the hill a hill. Now, though, the silence carries a different inflection – a silence in which one can hear, or at least imagine oneself hearing, a faint echo of those unremembered lives.”
Michael Malay, professor, writer
Screenings
- World Premiere – Cinéma du Réel (Competition), 2023
- FICUNAM (UMBRALES – Competition of Mexican avant garde films), 2023
- IMAGES Festival (Toronto), 2023
- Kurzfilmtaje Oberhausen (Distributor’s selection – Light Cone), 2023
- Côté Court Pantin (Art/Essai Competition), 2023
- Obskura Festival (Rennes), 2023
- EXiS Festival (Main Competition – South Korea), 2023
- Fronteira Festival (Brasilia) – Official Selection, 2023
- Open City Documentary Festival (London) – Official Selection, 2023
- Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival (Switzerland), Doc Competition, 2023
- Viennale, 2023
- Filmmaker Festival (Milan, Italy) – Competition, 2023
- OVNi Festival (Nice) – Group exhibition, « Des choses qui sont parfois et accidentellement vraies », Commissaire: Nathalie Amae, 2023
- MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art Rome) – “by the scars they leave“, January 2025
- Fundación Proa (Buenos Aires) exhibited in Disobedience Archive (la calle), curator Marco Scotini (May – July 2025)
- FUSO – festival internacional de videoarte de Lisboa (curator : Manuela Marqués)
Credits
Produced, filmed and edited by Bani Khoshnoudi
Music by Andy Moor
Hand developed at Laboratoire l’Etna, Montreuil.
With support from Cnap (Centre National des Arts Plastiques)- France, Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales (SACPC, ex-FONCA), Secretería de Cultura México, Atelier 105 – Association Light Cone
Book available here: Texts
BANI KHOSHNOUDI 