Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Thousandsuns
Cinema

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Mixtecos) was formed in order to provide a radical, avant-garde alternative to the commercial and corporate mode of filmmaking in Mexico and internationally. They have created 300+ films since 2012. Their film and digital artworks have been exhibited at museums, festivals, and art galleries around the world, including Arnolfini Gallery, International Film Festival Oberhausen, Flaherty Film Seminar, VDrome, Crossroads Festival, Filmadrid, Ambulante Cine Documental, Tate Modern, Media City Film Festival, and the 2019 Whitney Biennial, among many others. They were awarded the Images Festival’s Marian McMahon Award and MCFF’s Third Prize (2018). They are MCFF Chrysalis Fellows (2019–2023). Their collection of poetry SOLARES was published by Evidence at the Centre for Expanded Poetics (Montréal).

ONLINE SCREENING DATES: January 9 – January 30, 2023

FILMS IN THIS PROGRAM: Tonalli, 16 min, 2021,  Alphabet / A, 7.5 min, 2013; Eroded Pyramid, 9 min, 2019; Shrines, 3.5 min, 2019; Have You Seen?, 7 min, 2018; Parallax, 5 min, 2018; Tear Gas, 1.5 min, 2019; Impressions for a Light and Time Machine, 7 min, 2014; The Sun Quartet, Part 1: Sunstone, 8.5 min, 2017; The Sun Quartet, Part 2: San Juan River, 13 min, 2017; Soldadera / Percusión Visual, 5.5 min, 2013 
This series is co-selected and presented with COUSIN collective and is generously funded by a Digital Now grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Tonalli, 16 min, 2021

Tonalli is a shamanic composition in three parts: an atavistic preparation for a Flower War (Xochiyáoyotl); a solar-lunar ceremonial brazier (Tlecacitl) where Xolotl emerges in his turbulent opacity; finally, a solar irradiation (Tonalli) that manifests in the world as the flowing cosmic blood in which all beings are immersed. A Mesoamerican spell unleashed.

Alphabet / A, 7.5 min, 2013

A call for a political transformation, a life that emerges from the earth's own interior. A call from the beginning, the ancestral water, the everlasting belly from where life cries out.

Eroded Pyramid, 9 min, 2019

The Pyramid used to be a mountain.

Shrines, 3.5 min, 2019

An audiovisual shrine composed of small temples that contain images of ancient deities.

Have You Seen?, 7 min, 2018

Mother’s Day in Mexico is considered one of the most important family holidays of the year. Thousands of mothers have nothing to celebrate. They are the mothers of victims of forced disappearances. Mothers and relatives of the disappeared participated in the March of National Dignity. Mothers searching for their sons, daughters, and justice.

Parallax, 5 min, 2018

On October 2, 1968, the people of Mexico staged a massive protest against the country’s bid to host the Olympic Games. The Mexican army responded by killing hundreds of students in the streets. Employing disruptive montage, Parallax combines images from this original protest in 1968 and those filmed on the 50th anniversary of the student massacre, held October 2, 2018. The film offers a critique of the cyclical nature of political tyranny, while attempting to develop a new audiovisual language that drifts between the political and the poetic.

Tear Gas, 1.5 min, 2019

The Politics of Breathing: tear gas.

Impressions for a Light and Time Machine, 7 min, 2014

In Impressions for a Light and Sound Machine, a woman raises her voice in anger to give a searing and endlessly painful speech. A speech that with time becomes overwhelming. Her words are permanent, heartbreaking impressions burned into Mexico's collective memory. These words physically pierce the body of a historical film and a collective consciousness, tearing at the celluloid until the material vanishes.

The Sun Quartet, Part 1: Sunstone, 8.5 min, 2017

The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city, and, finally, the clamour of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.

The Sun Quartet, Part 2: San Juan River, 2017

The Sun Quartet is a solar composition in four movements, a political composition in four natural elements, an audiovisual composition in four bodily mutations: a sun stone where youth blooms in protest, a river overflowing the streets, the burning plain rising in the city, and, finally, the clamour of the people that shook Mexico after the night of September 26, 2014. The disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa opened a breach in the Mexican political body.

Soldadera / Percusión Visual, 5.5 min, 2013

A woman of the Mexican Revolution. An armed militant who puts us in touch with the pulse of the field, a waterfall of colors and gaits, in the footsteps of a woman who vindicates her struggle that never ceases to exist.


Against the exaltation of the image over sound, and the gradual isolation of violence, Ingrávidos proposes a relational image with political determination. Images disintegrate, separate from the sound, multiply, and stutter, connecting with each other and cracking up visual grammar like an egg. The interaction between the images dissociates their communal narrative practices, opening up the possibility of new critical approaches. Following Harun Farocki’s dialectical analysis of form and content, Ingrávidos subverts the hierarchical relationship between the visual form and the auditory, reclaiming the autonomy between them. The sound becomes the center of the attention; political discourses, machine guns, bubbling acid that dissolves bodies, and the audio recordings of police prosecutions create an overwhelming sound landscape that speaks directly to the political situation in Mexico, generating a complex and paradoxical relationship that disrupts the sense of discourse, and stimulates the perceptive domain of the viewer. – Almudena Escobar López 

Listen to an interview between Colectivo Los Ingrávidos and Almudena Escobar López at Visual Studies Workshop.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’ collection of poetry SOLARES (2018, Spanish) is available as an e-book from Evidence House. 

All stills, photographs, and artwork courtesy © Colectivo Los Ingrávidos. Screening co-presented with San Francisco Cinematheque and movimcat