Mexico City, June 12.—An atavistic eye that spans millennia stares at us powerfully and intently from the eye of a crater. Slowly, it takes shape on the big screen as the camera approaches at a weary, semi-slow pace, almost unwilling to reveal it. The play of light and rock, of cavities and strata, trace that elongated pupil; the whitish iris and a grayish, striated cornea mesmerize us: the topography and pareidolia can have a profound and captivating effect on us.
But there are not only retinas that appear before the viewer of the documentary feature Gods of Mexico (Mexico-United States, 2022), the directorial debut of the Italian Helmut Dosantos, since we find vegetal or microscopic fungal ramifications on a plain, perfectly squared and whitish mosaics on terraces drawn in the mountains, streams that boil in the sunlight, sand that creeps over the dunes like mist, yes, but above all people from all the countless cultures, trades, races, languages and climates that make up the pluri and multi nation that is Mexico.
We'll discover the Popoloca salt miners of the Sierra de Puebla in Zapotitlán, as well as the independent miners or "buscones" who exploit antimony in San Luis Potosí; some Huastecan huahuas spinning on a wooden cross; a Juchitecan muxe emerging from the dried mud; two naked lovers embracing; various elderly people with bundles of grass or branches among rocks, bushes, or rivers; fishermen carrying their catch moved by the wind, up to fifty black-and-white portraits of between 25 and 40 seconds in length, searching for an adequate rhythm to convey the essence of the characters and places portrayed.
Contradictorily, although this is a work that overwhelms and shocks due to its splendid photography and that has been stripped of all dialogue and voice-over , Gods of Mexico is, at the same time, a splendid sound work that combines sounds, laughter, whistles, traditional music, squawks, bells, cavalcades, flapping wings, explosions, fires, sledgehammer blows in a meticulous sound design by Nico Ascoli, because as Dosantos points out: “the film is really a symphony of rural Mexico, because we did a very capillary work with the sound throughout the film.”
